We like to think that we live in a free country, and it can feel like a free country to most people, until they come up against the Law, either personally or through someone that they know that has been arrested, to which many that are arrested are routinely found to have enough probable cause to then be prosecuted. You might think that police officers not being lawyers and not being judges, don't always get it right, after all, there are so many laws, with some laws that even lawyers have a hard time comprehending, as well as the fact that evidence collected by police officers may not be admissible for a variety of reasons, as well as police officers being fallible human beings, that therefore, with all those things considered, that people typically being arrested don't necessarily end up getting prosecuted, yet the way that the wheels of our justice system work, with the police and the prosecutorial elements working closely together, that just isn't the case at all.
Once you are arrested, prosecutors have options as to how to pursue any particular case, to which, you might think, the very first option would be to ascertain as to whether there is real probable cause to bring an actual charge against the arrestee. While many prosecutors will state that this is exactly what they do, in practicality and in actuality, that often is not the case, as prosecutors are far more likely to press the charge before any real investigation is made, simply on the basis that an arrest in and of itself with the appropriate paperwork filled out is probable cause enough that a crime has been committed.
Anytime that you set up a system to which justice becomes a numbers game in which the higher the percentage of convictions, whether via an actual trial by one's peers, or through the pressure of a plea bargain, and that thereby you have thrown out the window any semblance that the prosecutor should be in the business of pursuing truth and justice, believing instead that the prosecution should as a matter of course assert all the force of government itself, if necessary, to get convictions, no matter what, than you do not have a legitimate justice system whatsoever, but a total bastardization of it.
Far too often in this country, the prosecutorial element in conjunction with our policing forces, asserts incredible pressure against the very people that cannot effectively fight back, which are the poor, the indigent, the illiterate, the helpless, the mentally damaged, the substance abusers, and so forth, to bully them into submission and to incarcerate them so as to effectively make sure that these people will be perpetual wards of the State, without real hope of anything else, until the day that they die. The prosecutor wins their case again and again, but nowhere at any point has real justice been done, nor is this any credit to the community at large, this country, or to any aspect of true justice.
If the prosecutor's sole job is to just put people behind bars any way and anyhow that they can, they are performing that work exceedingly well, however, if the prosecutor's real job is actually to see that justice shall be done, they are failing their country and failing their profession. The power of the State to convict poor people on dubious charges is a given, but that is not justice, it is merely the assertion of the might of the State against the defenseless. Above all, the prosecution has an obligation to bring honor to the justice system, and this honor can only come forth in recognition that the people are to be served and not thereby to be lorded over, that justice without compassion, diligence, and justice unequally applied, is inherently unjust and un-American.