Hiring more Harris Co. prosecutors would harm the rest of the system

In Houston, liberal advocacy groups, including the Texas Organizing Project, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, are opposing Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg's request for 102 additional prosecutor slots. (See initial press coverage.) Ogg says the slots are needed to make dockets move quicker. But Grits would favor expanding the public-defender office by that much LONG before I'd support that many more ADAs.

As it happens, an academic paper several years ago analyzed high prosecutor caseloads at the Harris County DA's Office, but recommended against addressing the issue by unilaterally hiring more prosecutors. Grits thought it relevant to revisit why those authors thought a hire-more-prosecutors approach was a bad idea:

The biggest problem with simply hiring more prosecutors is that doing so would have adverse effects on the rest of the criminal justice system. Increasing the number of prosecutors without a corresponding increase in public defenders would exacerbate the indigent defense problem. Defense lawyers would still be overburdened and would be in a worse position because they would then be facing prosecutors who were better resourced and thus better prepared for trial and less interested in plea bargaining. 

A second objection to simply appropriating money for new prosecutors is that there would be no guarantee that the allotted money would be used to reduce existing caseloads. Prosecutors’ offices may use the added manpower to simply file more charges. At present, overburdened prosecutors’ offices likely decline charges for minor criminal infractions that they simply lack the manpower to prosecute. Increasing the number of prosecutors may thus result in increased prosecution of low-level drug or prostitution cases without any real reduction in the caseloads of existing prosecutors. 

A third objection is that elected district attorneys in large offices (who are primarily administrators and typically do not handle actual cases) may view new staff as an opportunity to enhance their political reputations rather than reduce existing caseloads. At present, most local district attorneys have no choice but to use almost all of their budgets to handle violent crime. A sudden influx of new staff might lead elected prosecutors to create new departments or to allocate new lawyers to pet projects that will make political hay. For example, very few county district attorneys’ offices have the resources to handle long-term, paper-intensive, white-collar crime cases. Yet, in today’s political climate, many elected district attorneys would surely like to have robust white-collar divisions that focus on high profile issues such as mortgage fraud or investment malfeasance. Similarly, as it has become politically popular to “go green,” elected prosecutors might like to expand the size of their environmental divisions. Or district attorneys may simply be animal lovers who want to expand departments that focus on animal cruelty. All of these are worthwhile projects, but directing resources to new areas will do little to reduce the enormous caseloads facing existing prosecutors. (citations omitted)

Instead, the paper suggested tying any increase in prosecutor staffing with increases in indigent defense funding. That makes much more sense in the present political environment, and would reduce some of the unintended consequences that would likely arise from a one-sided arms race between prosecutors and defense.