I'm a prosecutor. More specifically, i'm a trial attorney - not an appellate lawyer or a functionary specialist (like a designated arraignments attorney or court part attorney.) I try a variety of violent offenses - assaults, robberies, etc. It's the only legal job I've ever held - I worked blue-collar jobs in school (couldn't afford internships) went straight to government work, and I've been here since.
Several things are missing here, leading to a distorted view of the case. For starters, there's no judge. There's nobody explaining legal terms of art and legal concepts from an unbiased perspective. There's no clear authority reminding people that certain facts could never have come into evidence during the trial. Even a basic concept like premeditation is lost on most of the people on this forum, which sets most conversations off-keel from the get-go.
Also, you have nobody explaining the rules of how a trial proceeds. Nobody here to explain that statements made in summations aren't fact - they're inferences that each side asks the jury to draw from the facts. And the jury doesn't have to adopt any or all of those inferences to find the defendant guilty.
In fact, in place of a judge, you have an interested party - Rabia et al. The person who is making the decision on what transcripts and evidence you get to see is literally the advocate for the guy that was convicted. That's a huge problem.
And the only real intelligible voices explaining the evidence are a white-collar civil defense attorney and an evidence professor, both of whom are actively advocating for Adnan, and who are receiving privileged access to said materials. It's hard to argue with someone who doesn't abide by the rules of open file discovery.
And no disrespect to either Mr. Miller or Ms. Simpson - I'm sure they're capable attorneys, and they're probably smarter than I am. But they have no criminal trial experience. None at all. So when they say that Gutierrez missed an opportunity to make a point, people should realize that this is a lot like a green reservist critiquing military operations in Iraq.
In particular, they have a tendency to boil down on very specific questions of grammar and sentence structure and act like these things are important. And in an appellate brief, where that kind of minutiae is everything, I have no doubt that they are. But when it comes to convincing people - persuading people - they're ultimately irrelevant.
Appellate lawyers and civil lawyers like to make a laundry list of every possible point and argument in their favor. This is the most persuasive tactic in their sphere. But for a criminal attorney, you risk becoming incoherent. Claiming that they could have made hay over the distinction between a turn signal and a windshield wiper is precisely what I'm talking about. It's the kind of thing that would waste the jury's time and attention, hurt your credibility and make you look ridiculous, because it has nothing to do with the fundamental issue at hand - whether Adnan admitting killing Hae to Jay - and it has absolutely nothing to do with why Jay would have lied about that. It's literally post facto lawyers nitpicking over a tiny detail to try to diminish someone in front of the jury. It's completely blind to the optics of having a white woman condescending to a young black man about an irrelevant detail that has nothing to do with what the jurors really want to know. I'm willing to bet that talking about it would only have reinforced the jury's willingness to believe Jay on the most important parts of his testimony.
Another major problem is that this forum has become a place for completely unrelated advocacy. You have people coming in and reposting and rehashing stories about vacated convictions and trying to stir up sentiment against the criminal justice system as a whole. But the 4% figure that's been floated around here is blatantly inaccurate - I've discussed that elsewhere in more depth - and it's being blown dramatically out of proportion. Believe me, before you go to law school and start working in a DA's office, you're a human being. They don't make you surrender your soul when you get the job.
Before we decide to go forward, we examine the evidence that the PD gives us and we decide if it's persuasive. Then we attempt to enhance the case. If we can't do either of those two things, we don't go to trial. If we believe someone has a credible claim of innocence, we generally dismiss the case.We are just as troubled by every bad conviction as everyone else is, if not more so. But that doesn't mean that people aren't dramatically overstating how frequently it happens (and using data from convictions that are 30 years old to talk about the state of today's criminal justice system is absurd on its face.)
That's coupled with the fact that people are readily willing to leap to the conclusion that there was malfeasance. The slimy insinuation by Ms. Simpson regarding the detective's tape recorder is only the latest example in the rush to spit on police officers and prosecutors who are basically public servants. There's no glory for most of us. 99% of prosecutors will never become a DA. They will never achieve higher office. They grind out cases every day for a fraction of what their colleagues make in private practice because they enjoy the work and they enjoy the feeling they get from making their community safer. We ride the train to work while other lawyers drive their Benz. Not that I begrudge anyone their success - they are welcome to it and they probably worked hard for it and deserve every bit of it - but it galls me when people suggest that success or influence are more important to us than morality and ethics. In my experience, aside from the one bad prosecutor in a hundred, nothing could be further from the truth. We only take this job in the first place because we feel rewarded by doing the right thing, ethically.
But when people are confronted by questions of police procedure or paperwork or legal arguments that they don't understand, like Brady issues or why a certain form says X, there's a huge number of people who rush to the conclusion that there must be police corruption or malfeasance. And there's no countervailing voice to explain why that's not credible view.
Those are just a few of the issues that leap out at me every time I come back here. There's more, but I really should get back to work.