Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Fostering Equity And Accountability In Georgia’S Criminal Legal System Through Conviction Integrity Reforms, E. Addison Gantt, Meagan R. Hurley

Mercer Law Review

An often-quoted excerpt from Berger v. United States sums up the role of a prosecutor in the criminal legal system. The context is the federal system, but it applies across the board. It begins by explaining the duty of a prosecutor: to represent the sovereign, “whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”2 Then, it turns to the real-world application of that role, instructing that prosecutors should present their cases with …

The Politics Of Ethics, Laurie L. Levenson

Mercer Law Review

Prosecutors hate being told what to do. As "ministers of justice," they feel imbued with a moral compass that rarely, if ever, needs tweaking by outsiders. Their mission to protect society and the Constitution provides sufficient guidance. Being told how to be "ethical" is downright insulting for attorneys who already perceive themselves as wearing the white hat. Efforts to create ethical standards to guide a prosecutor's work may be perceived as little more than an unnecessary intrusion upon the prosecutor's independence and personal sense of justice. For some prosecutors, it is unwarranted meddling into the prosecution's business. As former Attorney …

A Penal Colony For Bad Lawyers, Bennett L. Gershman

Mercer Law Review

The concept of "disruptive innovation" is vague. Imagining the idea of lawyer "disruption" might conjure a scene from Al Pacino's aggressive role in the 1979 film And Justice for All 9 or embody the tradition of lawyers courageously representing unpopular clients, sometimes placing their lives at risk in courtrooms and on streets. But the panel, I discovered, was more interested in the concept of disruption as descriptive of radical departures from conventional lawyering and conventional discipline.

Recently, as I walked along the narrow cobblestoned streets of Prague--the same streets that Franz Kafka traversed while he was consumed by thoughts of …

The Bend At The End: What Lawyers Can Learn About Disruptions And Innovations In Criminal Defense Practice From Market Analysis, Donald F. Tibbs, Justin Hollinger

Mercer Law Review

In the world of stock market analysis, there is one certainty: the stock market is unpredictable. It acts with a will of its own, and despite experts' attempts at market forecast, no single person or machine can accurately predict the highs and lows of each day. Nonetheless, market experts extol new techniques; develop computer algorithms; and attach interesting monikers, such as Stochastics, MACD, and Bollinger Bands. But, in the end, they all succumb to the same rule: the unpredictability of the market suggests that no trading strategy is 100%, without fail, perfect every single trade.

That said, however, there is …

Municipal Liability? Not So Fast: What Connick V. Thompson Means For Future Prosecutorial Misconduct, T. Owen Farist

Mercer Law Review

In Connick v. Thompson, the United States Supreme Court held that, under section 1983 of title 42 of the United States Code, the Orleans Parish District Attorney's actions failed to rise to the level of deliberate indifference required for municipal liability. The Court affirmed the possibility of "single-incident" municipal liability hypothesized in City of Canton v. Harris as an exception to the ordinary requirement of a pattern of similar violations necessary to prove the stringent standard of deliberate indifference to a known or obvious consequence. Despite upholding the validity of the exception, the Court found that Thompson's case did …