COUNTY PROSECUTOR: SOMETHING HAS TO GIVE

As an assistant district attorney in the Dane County District
Attorney's Office for more than two decades, I have had the
opportunity to work under five district attorneys, most recently
Brian Blanchard.

I write this without his knowledge to give an insider's perspective
on his recent decision to drop prosecution of simple possession of
small amounts of marijuana.

There is not an ounce of fat to cut from the bone in the funding of
state prosecutor positions. In Dane County, as in the district
attorney offices throughout the state, the counties pick up the cost
of equipment, supplies and support services.

Dane County has, in 2007, the same number of state-funded prosecutor
positions as it did when I started more than 20 years ago.
Recognizing that the public doesn't want state government to grow, I
don't believe anyone wants to see a diminished response to increasing crime.

Crime in Dane County, as everywhere else, has gone up these last 20
years. Allowing no increase in the number of state-funded assistant
district attorney positions to deal with that is socially, if not
politically, irresponsible.

Prosecutors in my office welcome our charge -- we carry the burden of
proof, not the accused -- because that's what holds promise for
having a truly just criminal justice system.

But when our jobs become impossible because state politicians are
willing to talk tough on crime rather than fund enough positions to
get the job done, we have a problem the public needs to know about.
Simply put, prosecutors in my office carry too many cases to give any
one of them their due.

Most of the time, most of the felony prosecutors are handling more
than 100 cases at once, and misdemeanor prosecutors, up to 300.

Prosecutors in the juvenile unit are equally inundated.

Additional demands resulting from continuing legislative mandates --
preparing sentencing guidelines, replacing parole commissioners in
reconfinement proceedings, making data entries to a recently created
statewide case management system, to cite just a few examples -- add
time demands on top of growing case counts.

Because the judges control court calendars, we often are expected to
be in three or four different courts on different cases at the same
time, keeping judges, defense counsel, victims and witnesses stacked
up sometimes for hours.

Worst of all, the need to cut corners, move cases and compromise more
and more and more means plea bargaining goes way beyond what the
interests of justice can countenance. That is simply a little known
reality that has been going on for too long.

Blanchard has done all he can do to economize, double-up, reallocate
and borrow time. It's past time for the governor and the Legislature
to step up to the plate.

If they fail to meet their obligation to the district attorney
offices in this state to provide the minimum resources necessary to
allow us to do our jobs responsibly, the prosecutors in my office
will continue to urge the DA to do the only thing he can: Drop
prosecution of less serious crimes.