Prosecutors are the most powerful officials within the American criminal justice system. Prosecutors make the final decisions in sentencing the accused. Such factors put the prosecutors in a position to put the operations of the judicial system under their own control. Most of the prosecutors are the determinants of criminal case outcomes. The power withheld by the prosecutors is unrestrained. Additionally, the mechanisms put in place to hold the prosecutors accountable are not strong enough, and most of them are rendered ineffective (Davis, 2005). Most of the prosecution decisions are made in secret to prevent public scrutiny; hence the public cannot hold accountable the decisions made by the prosecutors. Moreover, most of the prosecution decisions, even if they are life-threatening, are discretionary.
Among the duties and responsibilities entrusted to the prosecutors, the charging power is the essential element in authority owned by a prosecutor (Gershman, 1992). This aspect puts the prosecutor in a position to control the entire judicial system. They own the authority to decide whether to charge a person with a criminal offense, and they determine the terms of sentence for criminal charges. The police officers are part of the criminal justice system, and they have the authority to arrest an individual if they believe that they engaged in a criminal offense, but they lack the authority to charge the criminal offenders formally. This is a clear indication that the prosecutor has unlimited powers in making such decisions. The decision to charge a criminal is a critical process as it determines whether or not such individuals risk losing liberty. The prosecutor determines such outcomes even when it comes to jurisdictions in which grand juries carry out investigations and bring charges by means of the indictment process. Therefore, the prosecutor is left with many options when it comes to charging individuals with criminal offenses, and this puts them in the most powerful position in the judiciary. The part of the reading that I found interesting is the possible threats to the specialized courts as such factors threaten the existence of the courts (Siegel et al., 2017). Specialized courts should not be under any kind of threat as they are meant to deal with specific issues that arise in the judicial system.
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References
Davis, A. J. (2005). The power and discretion of the American prosecutor. Droit et cultures. Revue internationale interdisciplinaire , (49), 55-66.
Gershman, B. L. (1992). A moral standard for the prosecutor’s exercise of the charging discretion. Fordham Urb. LJ , 20 , 513.
Siegel, L. J., Schmalleger, F., & Worrall, J. L. (2017). Courts and criminal justice in America . Pearson.
