Dallas DA on Exonerating Innocents
When I first started arguing this before a commissioner’s court, a lot of our commissioners—there are 5 of them—didn’t understand why a District Attorney, a prosecutor, was concerned with prosecuting innocent individuals. And simply, the role of a District Attorney, if you just read it straight out of our statutes is “to seek justice.” And that’s what we do, we seek justice. It’s just not to convict, but to ensure that justice is served and that’s a hard concept and it’s unbelievable that that’s a hard concept for our society to believe, to understand. Prosecutors are elected, unfortunately they are elected. It may be a good thing, it may be a bad thing, but because they are elected, they look at issues that are very simple. You have politicians that take these offices and it’s easy to get on television and tell someone that you’re going to be tough—that’s an easy concept because you can fit that within a 10 second sound-bite and get your message across. The hard concept is to explain to your constituents that you want to be smart and it’s more than just saying, “I want to be smart on crime,” you have to actually give an explanation of what that means.