I’d like to become a prosecutor and was wondering if anyone had any advice on what I should do to persue that career after “take the LSAT (I got a legitimately bad score and have to re-take it)” “appy to law school,” and “graduate from law school”.
Any and all advice is appreciated. Thanks!
Prosecution intern and practicing (subsequent to MA SJC Rule 3.03) ADA here.
Go to law school in the city in which you want to work. Not a necessary step, but it does help if you want to volunteer, do clinic work (which is what I do), and get your name out there, which is supremely important when you want to get noticed from among the thousands of resumes each DA’s office gets.
Do public interest work. It’s nice to have the big-money firm jobs in the summer, and it sucks when your pals are making their 3L tuition in their 2L summer while you’re working for free, but the fact is, if you’re in prosecution for the money, get out now.
Do not get sucked in by Law & Order (a). It’s not. Last night I stayed up writing a five-page memo against a motion to suppress, showed up at court at 8:15, waited around until 12:20, talked for 5 minutes, and the motion was granted. Does it suck that I lost? Well, I’d have liked to win, but the fact is that it was a coin flip- I though there was enough, but the judge apparently disagreed. If you’re big into winning and losing, this is not the profession for you. Keeping score about the little things is the quickest way to pull your hair out.
Do not get sucked in by Law & Order (b). Your first couple of years, you’ll be doing what I do now. There are some new hires in the office where I work, and the difference between them and me is that they get paid and I don’t. Of course, they’re eventually going to get promoted and I’ll end up where they are, but you likely won’t see a jury for a while. They get cooler bail arguments and such than I do, but your first year or so, you’re going to be taking pleas and explaining to a judge why some guy should have his license suspended. You’ll get promoted, and get to do trials. But not right away, and even when you do, they won’t be very cool. For every Lyle and Erik Menendez (which the big-boy DA is going to get anyway), you’ll have 35 ABDWs which will all start to look and feel the same.
You ain’t gonna get paid. Should I have taken a full ride to a 3rd-tier school rather than paying full freight for a first? I am given to understand that no first-year ADA makes more than 50k a year. I had to turn down a job because after expenses, I’d have had less than $1k to live on per month- that’s for rent, food, transportation, suits, etc. Not possible in a major metropolitan area without sacrifices.
You have to do it because you love it, or because you can handle being poor for the hopes of a payday down the line. You can’t let the job get to you. My first motion hearing was HUGE for me, but the seventh of the day for a judge who was, I’m sure, both amused and slightly irritated by the overzealous kid in the fresh suit with the memo. My big debut was doing something he’s seen thousands of times a week for YEARS. I love it. But I can compartmentalize. If you can’t, then don’t do this job.
You will become desensitized, if not completely, to some degree. I like to win. I dislike the bad guys. I like being in court. But I have some idea of which are winners and which are losers, and if you’re at all offended by the fact that some dude walked on a drug charge today because the judge liked defense counsel’s argument better than mine (even if that really is the reason), the do something else.
7a. One theory bouncing around the courthouse today (among people who even cared) is that the judge allowed the motion because there’s no way under the sun that we’d have had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting this guy. Is that “allowed?” No. I think that there was enough circumstantial evidence to at least get to a jury. But I can see where there might not have been, and I can also see where, even if my argument had won, there’s no way this guy would have gotten convicted. If your principles don’t take a backseat to conservation of state resources, don’t be a prosecutor either.
I love what I do. Then again, I’ve been poor all my life, so I wouldn’t know what to do with 160k. I’m probably not going to prosecute past this year- big hires this year mean unlikely hires next year, but I love my time and the people. But if you get a thrill from being righteous and waving the flag, prepare to be frustrated and/or make sacrifices.
The defense attorneys are not your enemy. In the end, they’re doing a job, same as you, and it’s a job that is not morally better or worse than yours. Remember, 99% of your cases are going to result in plea deals. You are going to have to get along with the defense attorneys or your life will be miserable. The inflexible prosecutors are always the ones who are the most stressed, because they end up trying way too many dog cases that they just can’t give up. The victim is not your client.
Learn very quickly to do good voir dire and win over the jury. A lot of trial lawyering is acting. Remember the OJ trial–his defense attorneys had that jury eating out of their hands by the end of it.
Understand the court system where you live. If you want to do felony cases, make sure you apply to intern at the prosecutor’s office that does them. Around here, if you work for the city attorney you end up doing speeding ticket cases more often than not–prosecutors who want big cases work for the county.
Don’t kill yourself in law school. You won’t necessarily need to be on Law Review to be a prosecutor. What you’ll want to do is practice trial skills as much as possible, and learn the rules of evidence like the back of your hand. 75% of your job will be knowing those rules.
–DB, public defender
“Pass the bar exam”
Interesting, Happy Scrappy Hero Pup – my ex-boyfriend is a public defender, and a lot of your list applies to their experiences as well. Especially the lack of money thing. He is so underpaid it isn’t funny. I guess I assumed the fledgling prosecutor types got paid at least a little better than that, though I can’t say I’m surprised if I’m wrong there.
I do have a question – why do you want to be a prosecutor? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to do, but there’s so many different things to do in law that I’m wondering why you picked that one.
Happy Scrappy Hero Pup: (RE: #5) In the Phoenix metro area, deputy county attorneys (equivalent to assistant DAs) start off making 56K a year and city attorneys (city prosecutors doing only misdemeanor cases) start off making 60K-65K (with no prior full-time, year-round legal experience necessary, but some decent law school summer experience is typically needed). Of course deputy public defenders starting out make the exact same 56K.
But I’d like to echo HSHP’s comments, particularly about waving the flag. Public defenders (and occasionally private defense attorneys) will be the ones wrapping themselves righteously in the flag and pasting the bill of rights to their foreheads. The most prosecutors can really get righteous is when a victim is involved (in more then a cursory financial way).
One piece of advice though - scope out online the prosecutorial agencies you would want to work after graduating. The various U.S. Attorney’s offices almost never (if ever, anymore) hire people straight from law school, even if you’ve interned with them in law school, so a state/county/city prosecutor’s office would be your best bet of initial post-law school employment as well as getting a lot of experience in a relatively short amount of time. Once you’ve picked out a few possibilities, try and intern there in law school. This will give you a feel for the particular office’s policies, procedures, and general political culture. There are a few paid summer internships out there, but the only catch is that you probably wouldn’t receive any law school credit for those.
If you do intern at a prosecutor’s office during the summer, or really any time during the year, you may want to keep in mind that many offices are both swamped and somewhat disorganized. In my experience interning at two different prosecutor’s offices, there was no organized mentoring program or training process. In fact, if I wanted something to do other than to watch random trials, I typically had to hunt down the attorneys around me and beg for work. Oh, and another thing - never, EVER volunteer to listen to jail tapes (actually a misnomer since now they’re just CD recordings of all the phone calls a defendant has made to everyone while he/she has been in custody). It’s interesting hearing the defendant describe their crime or protest their innocence to loved ones and go over every detail for the first few hours. After you’ve made it to week three, however, and you have to listen to the defendant describe to his girlfriend what aspects of her body he really misses most right then and how he hasn’t gotten any for three weeks - you’re ready to bite down on that false tooth cyanide capsule.
Does it make any sense to intern in a prosecutor’s office? I would think that the contacts one makes would be helpful when getting a job down the road.
Also, the sense I get is that prosecutor’s offices in very urban areas, such as New York City, are deluged with applications from burned out litigation associates. I would guess that your chances of landing a prosecutor job are enhanced if you are willing to work in a more remote area.
A high school friend of mine who is a prosecutor in a rural county is constantly telling me how desparate they are for attorneys in his office. He started working there less than a year ago and he’s already second chair on a murder case and he has many smaller cases that he handles himself all the way through jury trials.
I guess the downside to being in a rural area is that your cases are mainly (1) drunk driving; (2) domestic violence; and (3) kids doing various stupid things.
It seems to me that prosecutors are more “righteous” than defense attorneys. After all, if you are a defense attorney you are usually representing somebody who is guilty.
My prosecutor friend has the authority to reduce or drop charges that he thinks are unfair; or offer a good deal to people who he thinks deserve it.
Just yesterday I talked to a co-worker of mine who had returned to our office a few months ago after a 3 year detail at the US Attys office. I asked him why he didn’t stay there. He said they wanted a 4 year committment, and he didn’t think he could stand it. His comment was on how draining it was to continually send people to jail for long periods of time. Said at first he got a rush out of it, but it soon became apparent that the supply of bad-doers was inexhaustible and his efforts were just a drop in the bucket. Described having difficulty arguing that some loser should be sent to jail for 30+ years, with sentencing guidelines that meant he would not be eligible for parole for 20-some. Asked if it wouldn’t simply be kinder to just kill the guy. Especially tough when the crimes were not violent.
Also said he did not miss being on 24-hour call, being woken up at 2 in the morning just because some guy had gotten arrested.
Just offering this one guy’s experience.
Looking back a couple of decades, my best buddy from law school started at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s. He described a similar experience. At first it was a rush - you do trials faster than in any other law setting. But then when he advanced through traffic and to sex crimes, he was depressed at the prospect of a future spent just processing folks thru the system. Plus, the state’s attorney pays shit.
You see a LOT of prosecutors burn out after maybe 5 years, and go into private practice.
I had been somewhat courted by a US Attorney’s office a few years back, but decided that I personally was not cut out to be a part of the law enforcement system. Would have difficulty prosecuting someone for something I did not think should be illegal, or punished as harshly as set forth in statute.
Well, here are my impressions- remember, as a 3L intern in a major metropolitan area.
Upbringing- I like catching the bad guys, I like the idea that I’m helping, I think that my particular skills are best suited to help in this arena, I don’t currently require much money to live.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. The guys and gals in my office are (to use a legal term) kickass. Everyone is hungry, everyone is young, and everyone seems to get along just fine. The amount of good-natured ribbing that just sprang up is remarkable. Everyone seemed to figure out immediately where everyone else’s humor center was. This chemistry makes a lot of the little things (like office overcrowding, dearth of “fun” cases, etc.) much more bearable. We’ve helped each other acclimate to the way things are done in our office, and it’s like one great big group orientation every day.
I think so. The DA in my office knows who I am, how I work, and that I get along famously with everyone in the office. When it’s time for him to make a hiring decision, one of the senior ADA’s can go to the DA with my resume, rather than have it screened. Who wouldn’t prefer a positive known quantity over some faceless resume?
Perhaps I’m not explaining myself clearly enough. What I mean by “righteous” or “waving the flag” is that you can’t walk into work every day expecting to nail every defendant to the wall in the name of truth, justice, and the American way. Sometimes “justice” takes a backseat to expediency. Sometimes, “hey, we’ll see him again” is the order of the day.
Here’s a question: Let’s say a 21-y/o male (with a prior record similar to the offenses he’s here for today), in one weekend, steals a checkbook, attempts to pass a bad check, takes off, shoves a cop in attempting to get away, when released on bail, batters his girlfriend, beats up the two people that try to pull him off the girlfriend, then goes back to bouncing the girlfriend’s head off a metal railing until the cops come.
Let’s say this guy doesn’t see a day of jail for that. Let’s say this guy gets 6 months house arrest and one year probation and that’s all. And let’s further say that the house into which this guy is being released for six months of confinement is his NEW girlfriend’s house, a girlfriend that has just heard him admit all this to the judge.
Does the leniency of that sentence outrage you? Do you think that the “punishment” is grossly and negatively disproportionate to the crime? If so, DO NOT become a prosecutor. We’ll see that guy again and we don’t have jail space for him, plus he still might pull his shit together.
That’s what I mean by “waving the flag” and “righteous.” If you’re getting into it to put guys like that away, you’re not going to get any joy.
Sure, to a point. But then there are mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines that require justification before altering them, and just plain ol’ state resources that sometimes dictate that you let a guy go if you’ve got nowhere to keep him and worse guys coming through the pipe. In MA, jails are “overcrowded” the day they open.
That’s pretty much it- I’m in front of a judge 7 or 8 times a day every day I go in. But I’m doing OUI cases and the occasional assault or passing bad check or vandalism. Hey, even the legal world needs its ditchdiggers, and that’s what I am right now as a 3L.
But yes, if you’re interested in prosecuting to be a crusader, then the fact that you are 95% processor is going to get to you. You either compartmentalize, learn to deal, learn to love it, burn out, or move on.
Prosecutors see a lot of trials. A lot. And that means that you will lose a lot.
The fact is, the cases that actually go to trial are the ones that aren’t slam-dunks. They’re the iffy cases, the ones that lie far from the opposing extremes of “yeah, you caught me, I can’t deny it, I’ll plead guilty”, and “why did we even file this case, there’s no way this’ll hold up”. And in that fuzzy grey area, there just aren’t that many cases that a prosecutor can win. The ones that know you can convict 'em are going to just take a plea. If it were easy to meet the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, every bad guy would go to jail, every time. So, you’ll get to try a lot of cases, but the sad truth is you won’t win many. The vast majority of your convictions will be paper transactions, plea bargains. You’ll need to be okay with that in order to be a prosecutor.
There are some major pluses, however. For one, I’m terrible at being my own boss, so I like working for the state rather than working for myself. I get a regular paycheck, never a “slow month”. I get state insurance, for me and my baby. I get retirement. And most important of all, as one prosecutor I know puts it, I get to “wear the white hat.” I’m the good guy. I sleep well at night.
Also, if you’re at a party and you introduce yourself as a lawyer, people tend to drift away. Say you’re a prosecutor, and people want to hear stories.
Edited to add: I should say, after reading some of what was written above, that you will indeed become involved with some distasteful people, since prosecutors have to deal with criminals. There are some really sorry sons of bitches out there. But I’ve found that most of the defendants I see are just regular people who did something stupid and got in trouble. So, don’t think that you’ll be dealing with the scum of the earth every day, because it ain’t necessarily so.
Step One (1): Watch Law and Order. Watch all of Law and Order you can. Try to remember everything they ever put in there about the law or how it works or how people act.
Step Two (20: Never do, say, or act anything like anything on that show.
Suprisingly, most defense attorneys are not amoral jerks, fantastically rich slimeballs, manipulative bastards skirting the edge of major felonies, and so on. The Richest White Guy you can find vaguely related to the case is proibably not the guilty man. You are not Jack McCoy (thank God) and if you try anything like what he does you’ll be tossed out of the State Bar and into prison so fast you’ll still be wondering where the Starbucks went when they shut the iron bars on you.
I wanted to comment on this, because I’m not sure it’s been addressed (although it may be obvious). I’ve been looking into public defender jobs in California, and for every county I’ve looked at, the PD jobs and the prosecution jobs are on the exact same payscale – same salary for entry-level, and same for level I, II, III, etc etc. The rationale for this seems apparant to me – the system is intended to be a fair one, and if you offer prosecutors better pay than public defenders, you end up with a lop-sided system where all the good attorneys want to be prosecutors. Is this the way it probably is anyway? Sure, probably, since a DA is a more prestigious job than a PD. But at least how much the government pays for the jobs doesn’t encourage it.
For the record - I was a little surprised when I noticed this as well, but it seems logical, and I’m glad it’s that way (at least in California).
I was an asst. county prosecutor for six years, and found it tremendously rewarding. I liked working with cops, victims of crime and expert witnesses. I liked police ride-alongs (including in a police helicopter!). I liked being able to stand up and say “The State of Ohio calls as its next witness…” I liked that a prosecutor’s ethical duty is not to get convictions, but to see that justice is done; I was just as happy to dismiss charges against someone I believed to be innocent, as I was to zealously try to convict a guy I believed to be guilty. I liked that I was able to help take some bad guys off the street, and also to help some victims of crime see their abusers get hammered. And I liked that I had to work very, very few nights and weekends, unlike my friends at big firms. The pay wasn’t even too bad.
My advice? Work hard. Maintain your moral compass. Find a mentor in the office whose advice you value and whose judgment you trust. Keep up to date on your CLE. Don’t take it personally when you lose; try to learn from every mistake and loss. Be polite even to the scum of the earth. Leave the office at the office, and have a life outside of the courthouse.