It's all about incentives and incentives not always work arithmetically. Also note, that symmetrical funding will mean costs inflation - if defendant gets a million, prosecutor probably would have to spend more on prosecution, since now he has to overcome a million-dollar lawyers. So those cases that get to trial would be much more than twice expensive as before - because while prosecutors have huge resources behind them, they rarely use all of them, unless the other side has equally huge resources. If you force resource match, every case would require all huge resources. And this means incentive to not let that happen would increase dramatically, because the difference is between quick case close in couple of days and prolonged attrition battle with complete involvement of all resources.
>>>> Additionally I would propose that in some random subset of accepted plea bargains, a trial is forced
So, let's say the defendant pleads out and the jury can not convict him because of whatever stupid thing. How it makes prosecutor necessarily bad? Remember in the recent case of Blagoyevich outright selling senate seat the jury could not convict him because one of the jurors thought it's just politics as usual and there's nothing criminal was going on? How something like that makes prosecutor bad? Juries are never certain. It would be hugely unfair and would definitely drive good ones from the job, because good people are usually sensitive to unfairness. Bad people would stay and manipulate the system so that their cases either don't get randomly selected somehow or get to a sympathetic judge, or some such.
> Also note, that symmetrical funding will mean costs inflation - if defendant gets a million, prosecutor probably would have to spend more on prosecution, since now he has to overcome a million-dollar lawyers.
I don't see how that makes sense.. If the prosecutor completely relies on having far more resources than the defendant, then surely the case is weak enough to lose?
It would definitely mean that prosecutors give up on more of their weaker cases.
> So, let's say the defendant pleads out and the jury can not convict him because of whatever stupid thing. How it makes prosecutor necessarily bad?
>>>> Additionally I would propose that in some random subset of accepted plea bargains, a trial is forced
So, let's say the defendant pleads out and the jury can not convict him because of whatever stupid thing. How it makes prosecutor necessarily bad? Remember in the recent case of Blagoyevich outright selling senate seat the jury could not convict him because one of the jurors thought it's just politics as usual and there's nothing criminal was going on? How something like that makes prosecutor bad? Juries are never certain. It would be hugely unfair and would definitely drive good ones from the job, because good people are usually sensitive to unfairness. Bad people would stay and manipulate the system so that their cases either don't get randomly selected somehow or get to a sympathetic judge, or some such.