Bruce Green was quoted in a Law360 article about the ethics behind New York’s new commission to investigate misconduct by prosecutors.
Legal ethics expert Bruce Green of Fordham Law School noted that the law does not limit the group to investigating allegations of legal or conduct violations, thus giving the commission power to determine what patterns of behavior or grey-area actions might fall under its purview.
The commission will thus have to answer the “philosophical” question of whether to bring cases stemming from borderline conduct — a prosecutor mischaracterizing a piece of evidence to a jury during trial summations, for example — or focus on serial offenders or only the most serious breaches.
But that direction will also be dictated in part by budgets, and whether the commission will have the staff needed to investigate a wide range of less serious allegations against prosecutors.
“Right now, prosecutors can engage in lots of kinds of low-level misconduct and essentially get a pass, or maybe a raised eyebrow or finger-wagging from a judge,” Green said. “So one possibility here is that over time, this commission can develop a body of writing about what behavior is or is not acceptable for prosecutors, even if it doesn’t clearly violate a conduct rule.”