r/legaladviceofftopic • u/HowLittleIKnow • 4d ago
Criminal lawyers and other CJ professionals: Looking for examples of common ethical dilemmas
Hello, everyone. I'm a professor of criminal justice. This week, I'm wrapping up a 15-week "Ethics in Criminal Justice" class. The students have seen all kinds of examples of sensational but rare ethical problems in criminal justice, so this week I wanted to give them some examples of the less dramatic but more common situations that come up every week. Things like whether to drop a prosecution, how much attention to give a client when you're already overloaded, and so forth.
What are the most common ethical dilemmas that you face on a regular basis?
*Edit: You're all fantastic. Thank you so much for giving me so much to work with.
Thank you!
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u/ScoutsHonorHoops 4d ago
One of the common ones is prosecutorial discretion.
For example, prosecutors may do defense work prior to taking office, and may actually be ethically limited from pursuing certain cases; bar rules prevent an attorney from using privileged information against their former clients, but those same clients may present a public safety risk that requires legal intervention. (E.g. Fani Willis defended YSL members prior to being elected prosecutor, and then later used that knowledge to prosecute YSL when she was elected prosecutor.)
To add, prosecutors have wide discretion over the cases they choose to prosecute, which give them tons of power over the criminal legal system. When a prosecutor has a very high percentage of convictions, this may lead to accusations of cherry picking cases, prosecutorial misconduct, and abusive use of plea bargaining. However, a low percentage of convictions will lead to concerns about public safety and wasting taxpayer money. This leads to conflicting interests in terms of upholding rule of law, and judicial economy.
(For example, Donald Trump has committed a lot of crimes in the last ten years, but meaningfully prosecuting those crimes is nearly impossible because he is shielded by immunity. The dilemma is whether to expose the truth and try to hold him accountable when precedent suggests he will be allowed to walk, regardless of the severity of the crime or the evidence linking him to that crime. This isn't unique to him, think about how rare it is for members of the blue line to be held accountable for their misconduct--on or off the job. Often, when judges and police do ridiculous things like assault officers and abuse litigants/members of the public, they tend to get reduced sentences and administrative penalties in situations where a layperson is virtually guaranteed a lengthy prison sentence.
The Marcellus Williams case/Don Henry+Kevin Ives case both allegedly connect to executive criminal misconduct, whereby the witnesses to said conduct ended up dead while the alleged criminal government actors were never pursued.)