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To: E who wrote (16212)	6/30/2002 8:53:26 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

"Good faith" doesn't make it for me. It would be interesting to look at job performance standards for criminal prosecutors. I have some familiarity with issues surrounding those for related positions in the Federal bureaucracy. With the Feds, the only way you can give an unacceptable performance rating based on one error is if performance is an imminent life or death matter, which it is not here. If your prosecutor were a Fed, he probably couldn't be given an unacceptable rating let alone get fired or sent to jail unless there were some gross violation or malice involved. Performance standards cannot demand perfection. I imagine that state and local regulations, the union agreements that cover the public employees, professional standards and the like have similar limits. There are lots of rules that limit the liability of people acting in good faith doing public service jobs and there are reasons for having them. I think you would find a lot of obstacles going after prosecutors as you would like. Much of the error that occurs under circumstances like that is due to tradeoffs on workload. I wonder if the taxpayers would be willing to pay for a prosecution that left no stone unturned or one where the personnel involved diverted man hours into covering their asses. Another big chunk of the error comes from communications problems amongst the parties to the prosecution. I imagine it would be pretty hard to hold any one individual criminally liable for an error. I'm sympathetic to your objectives, but I think that wouldn't be an easy change to make, at least not without getting into motivation.

To: E who wrote (16212)	6/30/2002 9:16:47 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

"if they acted in spite of specific evidence that suggested that further investigation might have proven the prosecution theory was wrong and might have therefore resulted in a different outcome for the deceased." Impossible standard. There is ALWAYS something else that can be done, can be investigated. Loss of years of a limited lifetime is serious too. Apply that to all criminal prosecutions and what you will end up with (for a while) is an amazing crime wave and empty jails. The "for a while" would be until people could get enough legislators elected to change that part of the law into something reasonable again.