Bina Ahmad

Volume 27.2 (download PDF)

Abstract

The U.S. legal system is a colonizer’s system constructed to uphold power and protect the powerful. For radical lawyers, it is the language of power we need to speak and understand to protect ourselves and our communities from this violence. As law enforcement actors, prosecutors are arguably the most powerful actors in our criminal legal system, able to ruin people’s lives at will and with absolute immunity to protect them from any accountability for any misconduct. Even with professional attorney ethics rules and state bar grievance committees tasked with holding attorneys to these ethics rules, prosecutors are still rarely disciplined. This note argues that in addition to small-scale abolitionist reforms such as abolishing absolute immunity, we must go beyond this and shrink prosecutorial power, and make not only prosecutorial misconduct but the entire legal system accessible, transparent and open to the public.