Maintaining an Ethical Culture
Trial Ad (and other) Notes: First up on the agenda for The Prosecutorial Ethic (after welcoming remarks from Maureen Howard and John McKay) was:
Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney, U.S. Attorney’s Office, N.D. Ill., E. Div., Chicago, Maintaining an Ethical Culture in a Prosecutor’s Office.
A few notes:
Fitzgerald talked about office culture. Just as some sports teams have a reputation for playing rough and bending the rules and some corporations encourage an atmosphere where cheating is OK, so do some prosecutor’s offices.
Ethics is not just about being smart or knowing the rules. (Of course, training does have some role and you want people to be aware of the rules.) In hiring, don’t look at only academic credentials and skills — think about the quality of the applicant’s character or soul. Does the applicant have a sense of who he or she is?
Think of an attorney alone in the office on a Saturday afternoon before a Monday trial. If the attorney comes across something that could help the defense and should be shared under Brady, you want that person to turn it over, not to think about how inconvenient it would be or how hard it is to get along with the defense attorney or how to talk him- or herself into thinking it’s not Brady evidence.
What do you do when someone says that there’s been a problem in your office? On the one hand, when a staff person has done nothing wrong, he or she deserves to be backed to the full. But if there is a problem and you have reason not to trust someone, you must take action. The credibility of the whole office suffers if there’s someone who can’t be trusted.
When a staffer comes to you to report a problem, make sure that your reaction is that this…