Introduction: Understanding Prosecutors in All Their Contexts

We inhabit a world where antisocial behavior, destructive personal interactions, nuisances, and petty law violations occur every day, in homes and on public thoroughfares, in rural areas, suburbs, and inner cities, in corporations and in families. Sometimes there are good reasons for circumventing the law, such as stealing bread to feed one’s starving family. Sometimes there aren’t. And while law-breakers are portrayed in the entertainment industry as social deviants, street corner gangsters, or sophisticated financial syndicates, they are also ordinary citizens. For many people, the law violation reflects a momentary lapse in judgment, or a way to deal with stressful life circumstances during a particular period, rather than a commitment to a dangerous or depraved lifestyle. In short, humans engage in a range of behaviors that cause physical or financial harm to others, offend moral sensibilities, and disrupt the peace, and they do so for understandable and unjustifiable (and sometimes incomprehensible) reasons.

Criminal law offers one especially powerful response to wrongful acts. Treating an action as a crime can trigger interventions by the police, courts, corrections officers, and community surveillance officers. Moreover, the crime label can lead to consequences for the actor both inside the criminal justice system (such as pre-trial detention, post-conviction incarceration, fines, and even the death penalty) and outside, in realms as diverse as employment, food and housing assistance, immigration, firearms ownership, child custody, and voting.

Who decides whether to engage the machinery of criminal justice (Bibas 2015), or to use alternative social responses, or to look the other way? This is not the decision of any single person, but many of the key choices belong to the criminal prosecutor. The prosecutor’s office is the gatekeeper to the justice system, preventing some people from becoming enmeshed in the system entirely, diverting others out of the system at some mid-way point, and funneling still others through to the end. It is a position that carries enormous power, and this power, if left unchecked (or under-checked), can dramatically influence the percentage of the population that is under surveillance or caged in the name of public safety. What is more, an unsupervised gatekeeper could disproportionately deploy system resources against vulnerable populations.

The prosecutor’s role in choosing society’s response to wrongful acts has grown stronger over the years. The law gives prosecutors greater influence today than they had in the past over the sentences that criminal defendants face (Bjerk 2005; Frase 2013) and the collateral consequences that shape their lives. While prosecutors have long attracted the attention of scholars in many social science disciplines (Wright and Levine 2017), we believe that the time has arrived for “prosecution studies” to be understood as a distinct sub-discipline. This book captures the state-of-the-art scholarship for entry-level scholars, experienced researchers, and engaged professionals.

Keeping competing interests in sight, and in balance, is generally regarded as the primary challenge of the prosecutor’s job, although scholars disagree on what a balanced prosecution portfolio looks like. The answer to this question is grounded in the interplay between theory and practice, between deductive and inductive styles of inquiry (Garland 2001, vii–xii).

A few general theories of prosecution have emerged lately in the sociolegal literature as a counterpoint to the prosecutorial tendency to declare simply that their job is to “do the right thing,” a prescription that carries great moral weight but offers little actual guidance. Jeff Bellin, for example, posits that prosecutors ought to think of themselves as servants of the law (Bellin 2020; see also Fish 2017). Bellin invokes the description of the prosecutor’s job commonly encountered in civil law countries such as Germany to argue that prosecutors should make their charging and case resolution choices in support of a rational, functional legal system. Such a system provides a relatively clear set of instructions that prosecutors ought to follow; hence, prosecutors should subordinate the wishes of the public and the victim regarding enforcement or non-enforcement, and they should reject vague objectives such as “public safety” or “substantive justice.”

Bruce Green and Rebecca Roiphe characterize the prosecutor as a fiduciary of the public trust (Green and Roiphe 2020). Like Bellin, they hope to develop a theory of the prosecutor’s role that offers more concrete guidance than the traditional “do justice” command, but they emphasize the fiduciary duties of care and loyalty, rather than a duty to the formal law itself. For example, these duties exclude choices based on personal or private advantage, obligate prosecutors to make choices based on the common good, and call for prosecutors to reveal more about their internal office processes. But the public interests that prosecutors vindicate are sufficiently abstract, according to Green and Roiphe, to allow prosecutors to make just choices in individual cases, setting aside the case-specific views of local actors in order to further or mitigate other systemic effects of their work.

David Sklansky, by contrast, emphasizes that prosecutors can never count on a well-defined set of objectives or a pre-ordered script. Instead, they serve a mediating function in criminal justice (Sklansky 2016), which means the job requires flexibility more than servitude. Sklansky tells us that members of the public hold incompatible goals for the legal system, alternating between (or sometimes combining) desires for rules and discretion, for police and for courts, for law and politics. Prosecutors have the necessary ideological, institutional, and operational tools to satisfy the public despite some of their incompatible goals. The contours of what satisfaction looks like may change on a case-by-case basis, but the prosecutor pulls the strings.

While each of these theories of prosecution provides valuable insights—both descriptive and normative—about the work of prosecutors today, we believe that they fail to account for the full range of prosecutor activities. In particular, these theories concentrate on the role of the prosecutor in the criminal courts and neglect the prosecutor’s relationships with other governmental actors, non-profits, or the community more generally. Theories of prosecution need to account for the prosecutor’s work upstream and downstream from the criminal courts in order to fully capture the job. A comprehensive theory therefore should account for the prosecutor’s efforts to balance criminal enforcement with other social responses to dangerous actions, and should look beyond the propriety of the prosecutors’ decisions after their cases have entered the criminal court realm.

Another limitation of some of these theories—both Bellin’s and Green and Roiphe’s in particular—is their tendency to view the job in a uniform way. They assume that all prosecutors everywhere should do the job in the same way, regardless of the particulars of the socio-legal landscape in which they practice. In particular, they do not leave appropriate room for the public to shape the work of local prosecutors—guidance that differs from place to place—while acknowledging that prosecutors must remain within the outer bounds that the law sets (Gold 2011; Levine 2020; Murray 2020; Wright 2017).¹ Moreover, the “servant of the law” and “fiduciary” accounts of prosecution describe well the functions of the office in some countries, but they do not fit so comfortably with the expansive job description of prosecutors in the United States. In short, it is possible to draw theoretical insights from routine practice, but it is unlikely that a single theory could draw together the many aspects of the prosecutor’s role, as performed in many different places.

In this volume we offer the reader an inductive, evidence-based approach to assessing what prosecutors actually do in their working lives. In other words, however one sets the proper equilibrium between public safety and justice, we believe that abstract ideals do not guide prosecutors in the field as they maintain their own sense of balance. Instead, choices that prosecutors make every day define the equilibrium, fortify it, or threaten it. For example, the prosecutor needs to devise systems to distinguish reliable from unreliable accusations, and to hold accusers accountable for errors and biases that lead them to short-circuit their investigations. The prosecutor also must decide how to correct for case-sorting decisions that could reinforce racial and socioeconomic disparities.

Whatever their implicit theories of the job, prosecutors must operationalize them within the communities that the local office serves, accounting for the entities and forces operating in the same sociopolitical landscape. With all of these groups, the prosecutor needs to ensure that communication is a two-way street, to reconcile public safety objectives with fiscal responsibility, public accountability, and ethical practice. For example, modern prosecutors are often involved in crafting or redirecting criminal justice policy at the macro level: they may lobby state legislatures regarding the drafting of new legislation, or they may seek to educate judges about the need to take certain categories of crime more seriously.

Modern prosecutors also take an interest in improving the long-term safety, wellness, and fair treatment of communities, looking beyond the cases generated by local police to a deeper set of priorities. Toward that end, they might help non-profits to secure funding for training programs or other social services, to keep would-be offenders out of the justice system or to facilitate the re-entry of defendants after their carceral sentences have ended. In short, the chief prosecutors who neglect these outward-facing roles to focus exclusively on managing an internal caseload lose the opportunity to craft a more structurally sound, fiscally responsible justice system, in conjunction with (instead of at odds with) community players.

In focusing on how prosecution is operationalized, rather than on how it is theorized, this collection of essays asks the reader to consider prosecution functions from a variety of law and social science disciplines and from a variety of jurisdictions. While the emphasis is on the United States, many of the chapters offer evidence of practices and trends from other nations, to put the practices we see in the United States into comparative perspective. Moreover, the United States itself offers a rich variety of approaches to most criminal justice system questions, as there are at least fifty-one distinct justice systems operating at any given time—and considerably more when one accounts for the degree of local variation within each state. Acquiring knowledge about just the federal prosecution approach in the United States is therefore unwise, if the scholar or policymaker wants to understand how most prosecutions are operating across the fifty states.

Turning now to the larger themes of the book: the chapters in Part I and Part III examine the prosecutor as a case manager and courtroom actor but offer views of the prosecutor at various stages of a case, and in various kinds of cases. Meanwhile, the chapters in Part II zoom out to examine the prosecutor’s relationships with other actors and institutions in the sociolegal landscape, encompassing their work outside the judicial process.

When the prosecutor acts in the case manager capacity, two main features of the job take center stage: discretion and triage. A vast body of literature has established that prosecutors in both the United States and in foreign systems possess significant discretion. They wield almost unchecked power to make decisions about who gets prosecuted, for what crimes, and with what results. As Lynch and Barno discuss in Chapter 1, and Johnson and Hernandez discuss in Chapter 4, discretion is at its apex when prosecutors are making filing decisions and plea offers, two areas in which the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to impose meaningful restraints on prosecutorial choices. Lynch and Barno further demonstrate that once legislatures—particularly the U.S. Congress—reined in judicial sentencing discretion, they transferred that discretionary power to prosecutors in what is known as a “hydraulic displacement of discretion.” This point emerges as well in Demleitner’s essay (Chapter 7) discussing a prosecutor’s role in post-conviction sentencing and in Hessick’s essay (Chapter 19) documenting the inability of elections to hold prosecutors accountable for their choices in most instances.

But discretion also arises because of the prosecutor’s need to triage cases: there are too many cases on the calendar but not enough time to handle all of them with in-depth care, and a greater-still number of cases that prosecutors could bring because of the breadth of criminal law but choose not to. Prosecutors thus need to identify which cases merit the use of their resources and which they can resolve through alternate mechanisms. The move toward summary trials in some countries has further aggrandized prosecutors’ power, as Heinze explains in his comparative look at trial practices in Chapter 6; the development of accountability courts and diversion programs has done the same elsewhere, as ably shown by Shomade in Chapter 9.

The chapters in Part III, by highlighting the prosecution of distinct defendant populations and case types, lay bare the complexity of the decision to file criminal charges. These chapters show the fallacy of a “one-size-fits-all” approach to understanding this crucial intercept point from the prosecution perspective. For example, in Chapter 21, Chacón explains how some modern state prosecutors exercise their charging discretion to mitigate the federal immigration effects of a criminal conviction, while Henning (Chapter 22) and Roberts (Chapter 25) argue that prosecutors ought to engage in more creative tinkering or outright declination to benefit the population of juvenile or misdemeanor defendants. Thaxton (Chapter 27) calls for more outside review of charging decisions in death penalty cases to minimize both the sheer number of capital cases and the degree of racial disparity, while Baer (Chapter 23) urges prosecutors and academics to tame their enthusiasm for unprincipled enforcement of corporate criminal laws. Rushin (Chapter 24) turns a critical eye toward the prosecutors who must decide whether to file charges against police officers; he offers keen insight into the institutional barriers that prevent objective consideration of the evidence in these cases. Lastly, in Chapter 26 Roach brings the charging decision into the national security arena, where international cooperation, independence, and the need for secrecy render the decision to file (or not) politically fraught and always subject to second-guessing.

Outside of the charging and bargaining arenas, the use of discretion can be found in many of the prosecutor’s other pre-trial choices as well. For instance, chapters by Fairfax (Chapter 3), Brown (Chapter 5), and Garrett (Chapter 8) demonstrate that prosecutors consider whether to present exculpatory evidence at pre-trial probable cause hearings, whether to undertake their pre-trial disclosure obligations generously or narrowly, and whether to cooperate with defense investigators who assert a post-conviction claim of innocence. Moreover, these discretionary choices at various phases of a case are interrelated, as prosecutors often decide at the time of filing what a case will be “worth” at the time of plea bargaining, and may craft pre-trial strategies (such as disclosure and motions) to increase their leverage in negotiations.

Sometimes these decisions are heavily shaped by office policies, but in other instances the individual prosecutor has autonomy to craft a unique approach. In the absence of statutory or constitutional rules constraining the available choices, this level of autonomy becomes the handmaiden of discretion. When discretion and autonomy are at their highest levels, the prosecutor’s willingness and ability to balance responsibilities as an advocate with responsibilities as a minister of justice become particularly important. Ruggieri’s exploration of the porous boundary between prosecutors and judges in continental systems in Chapter 1 provides a novel perspective on this problem, as the prosecutor’s duties shift in relation to the judge’s duties at different stages of a criminal investigation. Brown’s entry (Chapter 5) likewise explores the salience of autonomy when prosecutors are charged with fulfilling their disclosure obligations. Roach’s essay (Chapter 26) offers a contrasting view of the value of independence, as he describes the need for cooperation across nations when prosecutors make decisions about terrorism and national security prosecutions. Finally, Chacón’s chapter (Chapter 21) explores the degree to which state prosecutors exercise their autonomy in a federalist system – choosing to reject the tight coil imposed by federal immigration laws in favor of softer approaches to enforcement of state criminal codes.

As the chapters in Part II show, the prosecutor’s network of connections to victims, the state bar, politicians, and law enforcement make the job of prosecution both more textured and more challenging than the courtroom-centric view allows us to see. Moreover, competing obligations to courtroom workgroups, the state legislature, and the larger community complicate the prosecutor’s ability to focus exclusively on cases to the detriment of larger concerns.

To begin, the prosecutor must interact with a variety of individuals in order to do the job well, but those individuals often have agendas that differ from the prosecutor’s own priorities. The prosecutor must therefore approach these individuals in the spirit of cooperation but always retain a sense of skepticism about when and where their respective values and objectives diverge. Relatedly, in professional relationships prosecutors are not and cannot be partners in the true sense of the word. They serve multiple constituencies at the same time, which renders their sense of loyalty to any single constituency somewhat diffuse.

The theme of connection-but-not-subservience emerges starkly in Richman’s chapter about law enforcement relationships (Chapter 14) and Wright’s chapter about community groups (Chapter 20). Both authors note that prosecutors risk doing both too much and too little to satisfy the desires of these often outspoken groups, and that they must communicate carefully around expectations and boundaries in order not to offend or alienate. Spohn’s essay (Chapter 12) describing prosecutorial approaches in specialized units and Konradi and Konradi’s chapter about victims (Chapter 18) likewise highlight prosecutorial ambivalence about being beholden to those who are relative outsiders to the justice system. Prosecutors need to maintain a sense of detachment in order to preserve their professional judgment while continuing to show respect for victims and keep them as reliable witnesses.

Aside from remaining alert to the sometimes shifting equilibrium, the prosecutor cannot develop an attorney-client fiduciary relationship with either the police or the victim, as that might heighten adversariness with the prosecutor’s courtroom workgroup. The workgroup signals to the prosecutor that she should prioritize efficiency and the maintenance of professional relationships with other criminal justice actors (like the defense bar and the judiciary). What is more, the prosecutor must serve the rule of law and justice even if (especially if) those ideals conflict with the victim’s or law enforcement’s immediate desires. Heumann, Kavin, and Chugh illustrate this strain in their chapter about courtroom workgroups (Chapter 13); Yaroshefsky does the same in her essay documenting the connective tissue between prosecutors and defenders (Chapter 17). She portrays the relationship between these two sets of attorneys as far from unidimensional; instead, it bounces between collegiality and advocacy depending on office, context, and personality.

Tensions exist with the state capitol as well. As explained by Gold in his chapter about prosecutors and their legislatures (Chapter 16), the prosecutor relies on the menu of crimes provided by the legislature in the criminal code but does not approach the criminal code merely as its servant. Prosecutors’ authority to exercise discretion (to keep certain offenders out of the justice system, and to mitigate the effects of the justice system for others) keeps them from being a tool of full enforcement. At the same time they have a role in shaping what future laws will be, through lobbying efforts, media blasts, and congressional testimony.

In these various contexts, the prosecutor must navigate a web of interlocking relationships so as not to be out-maneuvered or to generate a sense of betrayal that might limit future pathways to success. Prosecutors must also stay apprised of their professional obligations as members of the state bar, as Green instructs in his chapter on bar authorities (Chapter 15), while simultaneously remaining alert to attempts by the bar to limit their authority in individual cases. All in all, the terrain is fraught with difficulty for the prosecutor who fails to attend to institutional incentives and or who ignores competing narratives about prosecutorial power and restraint in the public square.

Beyond placing these relationships in the spotlight, the chapters in this volume consider the connections between the roles we ask prosecutors to play and the professional environment in which prosecutors develop their skills. Metrics that a community establishes for what makes a “good prosecutor” emerge from and reinforce the case-centric view of prosecution, and prosecutors tend to be hired and promoted in accordance with those metrics. In other words, the metrics and the behavior of prosecutors can be regarded as mutually constitutive. That is not to say they are written in stone, however. Wandall points out in his chapter about hiring and training standards (Chapter 10), and Eisen and Krinsky emphasize in their piece about performance measures (Chapter 11), that a new set of metrics could and should capture the full range of tasks that comprise the modern prosecutor’s portfolio. A new, more diverse set of metrics would allow us to better assess the true performance of each person who holds the office and would send a signal to those interested in the profession about what skills really matter.

As in any writing about the criminal justice system, concerns about racial, gender, and socio-economic disparities emerge frequently throughout this book. We regard these patterns as too pervasive and too important to confine to any single chapter. No honest account of criminal justice can ignore the impact of race, gender, and class on the outcomes of the system (Alexander 2010; Ulmer, Kurlychek, and Kramer 2007).

We asked all of our authors to consider the race, gender, and class dimensions of the prosecutorial policies they were discussing writ large. Explicitly thoughtful connections between prosecution and race, gender, and class can be found throughout the book, but we highlight a few here: Lynch and Barno’s chapter about charging (Chapter 2), Johnson and Hernandez’s chapter on plea bargaining (Chapter 4), Eisen and Krinsky’s chapter about performance metrics (Chapter 11), Konradi and Konradi’s chapter about victims (Chapter 18), Wright’s chapter about community groups (Chapter 20), Henning’s chapter about the juvenile justice system (Chapter 22), and Thaxton’s chapter about the death penalty (Chapter 27).

Finally, the authors in this volume ably demonstrate that discontent with the status quo provides flat ground for new ideas to travel, spread, and sometimes swirl into a storm of innovation. These chapters provide us with abundant evidence from non-U.S. jurisdictions about various ways that prosecutors might engage in dialogue across professional and geographic boundaries. For instance, when we consider Ruggieri’s take on the prosecutorial role in investigations, Heinze’s chapter on trials, and Wandall’s entry on hiring and training standards, we can learn from techniques and procedures that other nations have embraced to evaluate more critically those that dominate in the United States. These authors have opened up new channels of thought for prosecutors everywhere to reimagine their professional identities and ways of the doing the job.

The banquet of ideas that this volume brings to the table could be especially welcome for newly elected reformer or “progressive” prosecutors in various jurisdictions across the United States. In areas such as charge declinations, pre-trial release and post-conviction integrity units, dozens of newly elected office leaders are signaling that conventional ways of performing the prosecution function are too expensive, racially compromised, and bereft of compassion (Bazelon 2019; Davis 2019; Levin 2020; Levine 2020). We also hope that this volume can set the research agenda for students, scholars recently arriving to this field, and others formulating their interests and agendas in the field of prosecution. And finally, for experienced scholars of prosecutors and prosecutions, we anticipate that the range of subjects addressed here can prompt a rethinking of the topics that merit attention going forward.

Chapter 1 focuses on prosecutors’ role in investigations. The author demonstrates that the extent of prosecutor control over police investigations varies significantly from country to country and varies depending on the nature of the investigative tools used. Prosecutors’ investigative power has increased in many places as the distinction between investigation and prosecution has softened.

Chapter 2 documents prosecutors’ vast charging discretion and the negligible limitations that the U.S. Supreme Court has placed on that discretion for prosecutors in both state and federal courts. It discusses four factors that have emerged in the literature as significant shapers of charging discretion: case factors, demographic factors, socio-structural factors, and local factors. Lastly, the chapter considers the role of mandatory minimum sentencing provisions in shaping charging decisions that have, in turn, accounted for nearly all of the racial disparities in American criminal sentencing and contributed to mass incarceration.

Chapter 3 guides the reader through the various processes by which prosecutors’ charging decisions can be tested in a criminal case: judicial probable cause hearings to validate arrests, preliminary hearings, grand juries, plea hearings, trials, post-trial motions (such as motions for judgment of acquittal or a new trial), appeals for sufficiency of evidence, or actual innocence claims on collateral review. The author further explains how and why grand juries could be used more effectively to check prosecutors’ charging power.

Chapter 4 explains the extraordinary importance of plea bargains in modern American criminal law practice. It recounts the historical evolution and rise of plea bargaining, and then articulates the various normative positions that various scholars have taken concerning the wisdom and morality of the practice. The author concludes with policy prescriptions, including more judicial regulation of plea bargaining, formal limits on the size of plea discounts, complete discovery during bargaining, and greater financial support for public defender offices.

Chapter 5 analyzes prosecutors’ disclosure obligations—often referred to as discovery—and the ways in which disclosure regimes vary across jurisdictions. Although most of the common law world requires broad disclosure, many U.S. states allow discretion to prosecutors to determine what they wish to disclose—such as by determining whether a particular piece of evidence is material—and when. Such narrow disclosure rules implicitly treat prosecutors as the actors best positioned to assess the risks of potential disclosure, the author contends.

Chapter 6 offers the reader a comparative look at the prosecutor’s conduct while in trial. It emphasizes the multiplicity of roles played by the prosecutor during this process: executive officer, judicial branch official, impartial minister of justice, forceful advocate for victims, officer of the court, and leader of law enforcement. It also discusses the rarity of full trials, both in the United States and around the world, the decline of juries, and the prosecutor’s role in jury selection before trial.

Chapter 7 explores prosecutors’ power over sentencing, beginning with the charging power and continuing through prosecutors’ involvement in potential parole or clemency decisions. The author shows that as federal judges’ discretion declined in the United States in the latter part of the twentieth century, prosecutors’ power to influence the post-conviction sentence increased. That same pattern emerged in other common law countries and in continental Europe, as discretion and prosecutors’ ability to bargain increased across jurisdictions.

Chapter 8 contrasts the traditional way in which American prosecutors have operated post-conviction (by maintaining their adversarial posture and defending their convictions) with a recent trend (using a less adversarial approach and cooperating with defense investigations into claims of innocence). Some prosecutors’ offices have formed conviction integrity units and have even assumed an affirmative responsibility to investigate closed cases after conviction. The author suggests that this model ought to be described as investigative or remedial, rather than conventionally adversarial.

Chapter 9 describes prosecutors’ role in the creation, operation, and perpetuation of accountability courts (such as drug courts) and diversion programs. After detailing the history of accountability courts in the United States and abroad, the author explains the non-adversarial approach that prosecutors take in such programs. Rather than arguing for a conviction, prosecutors in these courts work with a team including a defense lawyer, a judge, a probation officer, and other non-court actors such as drug treatment centers, to help the defendant restructure his life so as to avoid future law-breaking.

Chapter 10 considers the various approaches to hiring and training prosecutors that exist around the globe. It particularly contrasts the decentralized approach that characterizes hiring and training in state jurisdictions across America with the tightly organized bureaucratic models of many continental nations. The author emphasizes the impact on consistency and robust professional development that the bureaucratic model produces, two values that seem largely absent in the American landscape.

Chapter 11 takes the reader on a tour through the landscape of prosecutorial performance measures that currently exist (most of which focus on conviction and sentencing statistics). It then invites the reader to consider alternative measures that capture the full range of the prosecutor’s roles, particularly in an office that is committed to reforms that reduce a jurisdiction’s carceral footprint and level of racial injustice.

Chapter 12 introduces two important aspects of the prosecutor’s office architecture: the use of specialized units and vertical prosecution models. Specialized units help prosecutors develop expertise in certain kinds of cases, particularly those with sensitive victim issues; vertical prosecution models allow one prosecutor to handle a case from filing through sentencings. These two features often co-exist. The authors explore existing research documenting the influence of vertical specialized units (for sexual assault, domestic violence, and gang homicides) on case management decisions and outcomes.

Chapter 13 offers the reader a close-up view of courtroom workgroups, the particular combination of courtroom personnel (most specifically, judges and defense attorneys) with whom prosecutors interact on a daily basis. Using original interview data, the authors challenge the conventional wisdom that the workgroup itself is the primary driver of courtroom and case outcomes. They assert instead that the workgroup is merely one factor among many that influence case-processing decisions.

Chapter 14 takes up the issue of how prosecutors form relationships with law enforcement officers and teams, and the degree to which those relationships influence both the prosecutor’s work and the work of law enforcement. The author contends that dialogue and friction between prosecutors and law enforcement agents sometimes inhibits, and sometimes promotes, productive deliberation about public safety, the rule of law, and community values.

Chapter 15 addresses the role of bar authorities in regulating prosecutorial behavior and explores the influence that prosecutors can wield in the development of professional ethics standards. For the most part, the author asserts, prosecutors regard the imposition of ethical standards by these organizations as unwelcome; this leads prosecutors to resist them or to actively seek changes in standards they feel are too constraining.

Chapter 16 illuminates the complex, but often symbiotic, relationship between prosecutors and legislative authorities. While legislatures formally possess the authority to draft criminal prohibitions, prosecutors influence those laws in two significant ways. First, prosecutors have the power to enforce or to ignore criminal statutes in service of local priorities; second, prosecutors can shape the content of statutes through their lobbying efforts. In this setting both prosecutors and legislators prefer broadly worded criminal prohibitions, as they allow legislators to demonstrate a firm commitment to public safety while knowing that prosecutors will limit the laws’ reach through their enforcement discretion.

Chapter 17 examines the multidimensional set of connections between prosecutors and defense attorneys. Drawing on original interviews, the author illuminates the interrelated factors that affect such relationships in the United States and abroad, particularly the power imbalance that heavily favors prosecutors, the social architecture of the prosecutor’s office, the reward structures, and the lawyer’s individual characteristics. The chapter also considers structural changes in the legal system that have the capacity to shift the nature of these relationships, such as open disclosure rules and the election of reform-minded prosecutors.

Chapter 18 focuses on the interaction between prosecutors and victims in criminal cases. Starting from the basic premise that victims long ago relinquished formal power to public prosecutors, the authors consider the various ways in which the relationship with the victim can significantly influence the trajectory of the criminal case throughout the prosecution. The chapter also brings attention to the capacity of victim legal clinics to shape prosecutorial choices.

Chapter 19 draws on existing literature to inquire whether prosecutors are, or can be, meaningfully held accountable by the electorate for the choices they make. The author compares the United States, in which most chief state prosecutors are elected by local communities, to other countries, in which such elections are rare. The author emphasizes that the issue of electoral responsiveness is one aspect of the tension between prosecutorial accountability and the desire for prosecutorial independence, particularly in highly charged cases.

Chapter 20 considers prosecutors’ relationships with the communities they serve, specifically through the lens of community prosecution strategies. In adopting these approaches, prosecutors try to build or to fortify a sense of trust, at least in part by allowing the community to shape office priorities. But where the communities have experienced a history of racial injustice, the author argues, the twin goals of enhancing public safety and increasing the legitimacy of the criminal justice system can be difficult to achieve.

Chapter 21 tracks the interaction between criminal prosecutors in the state courts and immigration enforcement officials at the national level in the United States. Because the immigration consequences of criminal convictions have expanded and intensified over the past generation, the charging decisions of prosecutors now create remarkably diverse immigration effects. Some state prosecutors try to supplement the immigration enforcement efforts of the federal government, while others apply the criminal law of the state in ways that mitigate the immigration effects of a criminal conviction.

Chapter 22 addresses the performance of prosecutors as gatekeepers of juvenile court jurisdiction, and their failure at times to apply principles of adolescent development equitably across race and class lines. Drawing on recent findings in developmental psychology and the cognitive science of bias, the chapter offers a framework to improve prosecutorial decision-making, enhance public safety and help all youth achieve a healthy and productive transition to adulthood.

Chapter 23 criticizes the tendency of contemporary corporate crime scholarship to enhance and legitimate the government’s power to prosecute corporate defendants. If the prospect of unbounded enforcement and lawmaking powers are troubling when it comes to most criminal defendants, the same concerns ought to apply to corporate offenders, the author argues. This chapter considers the normative implications of an “unbound” corporate criminal law, and proposes legislative reforms that would impose needed restraints on the prosecutors who currently implement corporate criminal law.

Chapter 24 considers the unique challenges that prosecutors face when they investigate and charge police officers suspected of criminal misconduct. Prosecutors rarely pursue criminal charges against police officers and secure convictions even less often. The chapter explores some of the possible reasons for the lack of success in these cases, including potential conflicts of interest and institutional barriers. It also reviews some of the most compelling scholarly recommendations to improve the investigation and prosecution of criminal conduct by police officers.

Chapter 25 discusses the role of prosecutors in the misdemeanor system. It argues that prosecutors under-utilize their discretion to decline and dismiss low-level cases. Informed prosecutorial decision-making in this arena is critical for several reasons: the enormous volume of arrests, structural and institutional realities that weaken the role of other lower court actors, racial disparities in the impact of misdemeanor charges, and the need to mitigate the myriad disproportionate effects of the ever-growing number of collateral consequences that flow from a minor criminal record.

Chapter 26 examines the distinct operational and ethical challenges that prosecutors face in national security and terrorism cases. The operational challenges include demands for specialization, the availability of special investigative powers, and the complexity of international co-operation. The ethical challenges require prosecutors to balance legitimate claims of secrecy against equally compelling demands for disclosure, and to maintain prosecutorial independence while recognizing the effects of national security cases on the whole of society.

Chapter 27 explores the prosecutor’s role in death penalty cases. The author argues that limiting the most aggressive prosecutorial decisions in potentially capital cases might reduce the prevalence of error and the expense of these cases. The chapter proposes reforms to prosecutor decision-making, including advisory opinions from a reviewing authority to assess the appropriateness of a prosecutor’s decision to seek the death penalty, and cost-shifting mechanisms to discourage prosecutorial overreaching in capital charging.