A. Assistant District Attorneys
i. Most assistant district attorneys are hired immediately after graduation
from law school or after a short time in private practice.
ii. In the past, many prosecutors hired assistants on the basis of party
affiliation and the recommendations of elected officials. Increasingly,
however, greater stress is being placed on merit selection.
iii. The turnover rate among assistant district attorneys is high due to issues
such as low pay, growing tired of the job, and the view by many of the
assistants that the job is a step toward a more lucrative private practice.
B. Learning the Job
i. Law schools provide an overview of law on the books such as criminal
law, criminal procedure, evidence, and constitutional law, but most law
schools give their students very little exposure to law in action. For
decades, training in prosecutors’ offices was almost exclusively on the
job.
ii. Law schools have been under increasing pressure to teach their students
more about the actual practice of law. Many have responded by adding
more skills-oriented classes to their curricula, problem-based learning
within classes, and a host of community engaged learning activities (such
as legal practice clinics and internship placement programs) that are
aimed at helping students become more prepared to enter the legal
workforce (Bard, 2011).
C. Promotions and Office Structure
i. Promotions are related to office structure (Flemming, Nardulli, &
Eisenstein, 1992).
ii. Small prosecutors’ offices usually use vertical prosecution, in which
one prosecutor is assigned responsibility for a case from intake to
appeal (Nugent & McEwen, 1988). In these offices, assistants are
promoted by being assigned more serious cases.
iii. Most prosecutors’ offices in big cities use horizontal prosecution, in
which prosecutors are assigned to specific functions, such as initial
appearance, charging, preliminary hearing, grand jury, trial, or appeal.
Under horizontal prosecution, assistants spend a year or more handling
misdemeanor offenses before they are promoted to felony trials.
iv. Over the past decades, specialization has become increasingly
common in chief prosecutors’ offices, particularly in densely
populated jurisdictions.
D. Supervision
i. Assistant district attorneys are supervised by a section head, who is
supposed to ensure that they follow policies of the office.
ii. However, assistant DAs enjoy fairly broad freedom, office policies are
general and somewhat vague, and official and unofficial policies are
simply part of what the assistant learns informally.
iii. In large offices, decentralized work assignments mean that supervisors
can exert only limited control over specific cases or individual
assistants. Each assistant has dozens of cases that require individual