From
Cuffs
to Conviction
THE ROLE OF PROSECUTORS IN DRIVING AMERICA’S MASS INCARCERATION PROBLEM
I
n 2016, a young man was arrested for robbery in Kansas City, Mo. The prosecution alleged that the man had forcefully robbed a pedestrian outside of the city’s Embassy Suites hotel. The man, unable to afford a private attorney, waited in jail for 13 months before the local public defender’s office had a chance to take his case. Once the public defender’s office opened his case file, however, the investigation was swift–his public defender quickly realized that 23 seconds after the victim placed a 911 call to report the robbery, the man had been caught on tape at a gas station that was a six-minute walk from the hotel, proving he could not have committed the crime. The man was released shortly after the investigative evidence was revealed, but he had already spent 13 months unnecessarily confined in a jail cell, jeopardizing employment, housing, and important relationships. This man’s situation wasn’t unique, according to Ruth Petsch, head of Kansas City’s public defender’s office. With only 34 attorneys, the Missouri public defender system was so overloaded with cases in 2017 that it stopped taking new clients altogether, instead forcing people to either take a plea deal or wait indefinitely in jail for an assignment to a defender. Missouri has the second-highest caseload per public defender—behind only Louisiana— but the situation is not much better elsewhere around the country. The United States criminal justice system is full of inefficiencies, poor incentives, and rules and practices unseen elsewhere in the developed world. The country’s laws give prosecutors enormous discretion and power, and in many places leave defendants and their poorly funded defenders at the mercy of prosecutorial decisions. This imbalance causes perverse injustices and is a driving factor of
Avery Rogers
Courthouse in Kansas City, Missouri
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