District Attorney's Role In Criminal Justice

I remember when I took part in a law education program for middle school students at the Judicial Research and Training Institute. I was a 13-year-old girl who just started to dream about becoming a lawyer. Watching the prosecutors, judges and lawyers and listening to them lecture in elegant robes were enough for a little girl to consolidate her dream. Six years later, I got another chance to see the lawyers again; not in Korea, but in United States.

After we arrived at the District Attorney’s office, we met a lady named Susan Schroeder. She lectured about what the District Attorney does, and the role of the American Criminal Justice. The District Attorney’s office handles more than 70,000 cases per year, and it files charges on over 58,000

It was so impressive to watch the prosecutors and the defense attorney trying to persuade juries. It was just like the court scene I saw in American TV dramas. But since it was not the drama, they had made some mistakes. The prosecutor sounded overly showy and somewhat looked less prudent by using the phrase like ‘oh brother’. Also he had mistaken the dates several times, and wrote March instead of May. The defense attorney, on the other hand, looked very unorganized, and he repeated the same idea over and over again, that it actually resulted in diverting the attention and deemphasizing the main point.

The trial was about the man who took the metal scraps that were in possession of a company. The metal scraps were about $500 worth, and the man took them twice without the permission of the owner. The defendant did not testify on the trial but insisted that someone told him that he could take them and that he didn’t know the scraps belonged to the

Law seems to be a solid and fixed rule that everyone follows, but as I become more and more aware of it, I started to think it is not the matter of following it, but the matter of interpreting and manipulating it. Even with the same clause, it can be applied in million different ways. Since it is based on words, rather than what it says, how it says matters more. I could see it in the trial too; the prosecutor was emphasizing the valuable those metal scraps were, the defense attorney kept referring to them as trash. Also, the defense attorney claimed it’s very hard to go beyond a reasonable doubt, while the prosecutor asserted it is not impossible to reach it. Both of them were referring to the same concepts, but defined them differently. The more you know about the law, the more you are able to draw a judgment of an