T. Pete Adams knows prosecution, prosecutors and prosecutors’ challenges about as well as anyone. Pete is in his 31st year as executive director of the Louisiana DAs’ association and is probably the nation’s longest-serving official in such a position. In a recent issue of LDAA’s newsletter, he made some salient remarks about a familiar issue that concerns us all.
“The same story is told all over the nation,” he wrote, “when I visit or meet former prosecutors from here and from other states. The best years of my professional life were spent as a prosecutor.” The words may vary a bit, but the message is the same. Being a prosecutor is the greatest job of their life for most who have experienced it. Where else can you make such a difference? The personal and professional satisfaction of helping a devastated victim and their family, or helping a wayward kid is hard to beat. In contrast, the popular media carries the message that prosecutors are ambitious, bloodthirsty buffoons who care only about notching convictions. Criminal defense attorneys, meanwhile, are shown as compassionate, moral crusaders fighting for truth and justice against a corrupt system. How can we more effectively communicate the truth about what we do?
Pete Adams’s comments and question go to the heart of one of our most urgent challenges. To Pete and others of our prosecution colleagues who are expressing similar concerns, I want to assure you that no problem has a higher priority in NDAA. As you read this, we are laying the foundation for an aggressive, continuous program to communicate more effectively what we do, stress what we stand for and energetically respond to news media stories, radio ads, TV programs and any other sources that distort what we do and why we do it and defame out profession.
This issue has been the subject of a great deal of discussion in NDAA and has reached the state of urgency.
To get to the nub of it, we, as prosecutors, know who we are and what we stand for, but the public too often doesn’t. As former NDAA president Bob Johnson said at a recent executive committee meeting, “We stand for the truth.” It’s as simple as that. In the pursuit of justice and the protection of our communities, we wear the white hats and we should be proud to say it and should not be timid about saying it. The problem is that the public isn’t fully aware of it. In fact, the public is developing more negative impressions of us as the result of such outrages as the Court TV program that gave the false impression that the rare exoneration of relatively few prisoners means that prosecutors are sending many innocent defendants to prison. Or consider the disgraceful Chicago Tribune series that implied that most confessions are coerced and should not be believed, and questioned the reliability of eyewitness testimony, forensics, arson evidence and state crime labs. This continuous barrage of distortion and misrepresentation of the role and performance of prosecutors could ultimately affect the ability to obtain good jurors, and eventually undermine the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system.
So we are going to respond with every weapon in our arsenal.
Our president-elect, Paul Logli, points out that the defense bar is attempting to occupy the high ground and steal our white hats in this battle for public confidence, and warns, “We must counter this quickly and effectively with a continuous, aggressive campaign that includes a lot more public education as well as media education.”
Under the leadership of President Walsh and continuing under his successor, Paul Logli, this is precisely the kind of program that is going to be developed, probably with some professional outside advice.
I cannot emphasize too strongly that to be effective, this is going to require more than staff. It is going to require prosecutors—particularly a group of experienced, widely-known, articulate prosecutors. These individuals must be prepared to speak out on every possible major media outlet, telling our story, providing rapid responses to distortions of our mission and attacks on our profession, and generally carrying out a impressive, continuous program of public education, media relations, and rapid response.
And here’s the key to the success of the program. We will be calling on prosecutors around the country to become our front-line troops, carrying our message and, if necessary, the battle, into the public arena. We are tired of seeing and hearing people described as “former prosecutors” who may have never tried a local criminal case, pontificating on TV. NDAA’s membership, meanwhile, includes America’s most experienced prosecutors who can speak with authority and expertise and reflect credit on our profession. We must come out of the audience and become participants.
Remember, we’ll have the advantage that most of our critics and detractors don’t: the truth.
