The solution to fear.

What to do?

Prosecutors are already supervised; they are in many ways constrained. What to do about this freedom they in the exercise of their power over the indigent, over people who for various reasons walked into the criminal justice web? Unlike superheroes, the Harvey Dents of real life are prone to mistake, prone to malice, prone to ignorantly causing injustice while in the pursuit of apparent professional success. It is a power only they can control and refrain from abusing.

Are you honestly suggesting that every acquittal or successful appeal is an instance of injustice? If that's not what you're suggesting, what did these two sentences mean?

I believe that is because we inherently believe in justice, so when justice is done - a murderer is put away, a heinous criminal punished and victims vindicated - we take the result for granted as the due course of nature.

I believe in justice, but I don't think everyone convicted of murder is remotely guilty, and I don't think any conviction "vindicates" a victim. So could we go a little more closely over those steps?

The incidents of injustice are the ones that deeply jar our preferred view of the world and take us farther from what we want the world to be. The convictions are reported without a shadow of a doubt; the evidence is always presented overwhelming.

You are writing about life in a city that is as safe as it has been in two generations, and is beginning to approach the absolutely atypical period of public order from 1935 to 1960, which was the most remarkably relatively crimeless period in the city's entire history. Yet you are writing with the sort of concentrated relentless about the idea of the existence of crime that would have seemed familiar to beleaguered Manhattanites in 1991. Crime rates have been falling for a generation, and despite the current hard economic times, which should be generating a great deal of additional public disorder given historical models, we are living in great civic tranquility. Some windows have been broken in Santa Monica, and some aggressive and disturbed teenagers (whom we used to call juvenile delinquents) have stolen someone's wallet? No, fear is not justified. A good subject for an essay might be the exploration of the causes of your fear.

Surely you've some awareness of the sound of this talk of locking away dangerous elements? So we've got two million people in jail, which is a higher proportion of our population than any civilized nation on earth, and there are more young black men in prison in the United States than there are in college, and you think we're just locking up "dangerous elements"? Nor do either you or I see any sign that the size of the dangerous element has been in any way reduced, even though we are already imprisoning millions of people and are spending trillions of dollars every generation on prison construction and operation. So perhaps you can tell me just what evidence you have to support the very dubious statement above?

The last is perhaps the easiest. Sentences can be increased for crimes that are easily proved and likely linked to other crimes (such as drug laws), and legislatures can broaden the reach of criminal statutes. Those actions have been taken.

With what positive result?

How do we discuss prosecutorial discretion until we clean up the harm done by implying that every acquittal is an injustice?

It's not an accusation. It's an observation. I know exactly what he means.

Law school is a disempowering experience, or maybe just first year, with severely limited freedom of choice and anonymized individuals, set towards one competitive goal like racing dogs. At the same time, because of the impossibility of specialization at this level of learning, I find myself easily replaceable. Even work for voluntary pro bono projects showcase how useless a first year student is; the work usually involves helping someone fill out government forms and presenting an obvious case against an absent adversary. It must be exhilarating to be a first-year attorney with the power to charge and prosecute and to win. Every client deserves zealous advocacy. For most lawyers the client is an easily identifiable individual or entity whose goals are so clearly defined that the lawyer’s work is bound by their boundaries. Not so much the lawyer whose client is the state. They are supervised. They are in many ways constrained. They also have freedoms and powers over the indigent, over people who for various reasons walked into the criminal justice web, that only they could control.

This "power to charge and prosecute and to win" is the power to damage or destroy many innocent lives in pursuit of the "guilty." Many of the young people who decide that they want this power tend to conceal from themselves, as one might expect them to do, what it really is. They tend to behave as though at the moment of the crime the universe shrinks until it contains only the state, the criminal and the victim. Then they set themselves to making sure that the accounts balance out in this absurdly misshapen little universe, often without the slightest empathic awareness of all the others whom they injure in the process. The offender's family, for example, are merely people he should have taken better care of, no part of "the People" on behalf of whom the prosecutor is doing her job. And so on.

It is this self-righteous refusal to understand the presence of others who must be cared for, and the obscene simplicity of the idiotic belief in the value of punishment, that the Legal Aid lawyer was remarking. It's the occupational hazard of young prosecutors. After a while, most of them lose their lust for judgment. A few become judges. The rest have a chance to become valuable public servants, or else they become something far more dangerous to the public good.

But what about the question that sparked the essay? You never do go back to give the right answer; it seems to me that to address the question and give the professionally appropriate answer is probably the most useful thing you could have done in order to edit scrupulously this present draft.

Blame Politics?

The solution to public fear is to broaden the reach of criminal statutes.

The Superhero Ideal

Fear is a simply emotion to react to than fairness, in the political realm

Fear is justified.

The popular sentiments of the visibly law-abiding voters rule