What is a Prosecutor?
The prosecutor is a lawyer who represents the government that is charging you with a crime. The police are, in this situation, investigators for the government. Prosecutors are responsible for making the decision whether to charge someone with a crime. They also present the government’s case at trial. Prosecutors may be called city attorneys, county attorneys, state’s attorneys or district attorneys.
In New Jersey, County Prosecutors are the chief law enforcement officers of their County and are responsible for enforcing the criminal laws of New Jersey in their counties. Each county in New Jersey has only one County Prosecutor. The County Prosecutor has Assistant Prosecutors who help him or her enforce the law. In other states they are called Assistant District Attorneys, Assistant People’s Attorneys, Assistant Commonwealth Attorneys, etc. The County Prosecutor’s staff also includes County Detectives or Investigators (Police Officers), secretaries, paralegals and agents.
A prosecutor is first and foremost an officer of the court. Prosecutors are an institution and should not be compelled to defend every police investigation and prosecute every citizen accused if to do so would advance deceit or convict an innocent person. Prosecutors are to ensure justice regardless of public or private pressure, political considerations, or personal advancement. Prosecutors have a unique role in the criminal justice system. This was most effectively conveyed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1935 case of Berger v. U.S., 295 U.S. 78, 88. The prosecutor is: [T]he representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty 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. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall
