But the electorate continues to reward "tough on crime" prosecutors. Their incentives are all towards maxing out the savagery towards defendants, systemic repercussions be damned.

From the article:

> Janie Harvey Garner, the founder of Show Me Your Stethoscope, a nursing group on Facebook with more than 600,000 members, worries the conviction will have a chilling effect on nurses disclosing their own errors or near errors, which could have a detrimental effect on the quality of patient care.

> "Health care just changed forever," she said after the verdict. "You can no longer trust people to tell the truth because they will be incriminating themselves."

That's the exact opposite of how the NTSB operates. It satisfies the infantile urge to blame and shame a supposed evildoer, to the great detriment of everybody in the long run.

> That's the exact opposite of how the NTSB operates.

Bingo! I have a friend in the UK who organizes "post-mortem" (no pun intended) workshops and process training for hospital staff, precisely to do the NTSB-like thing after medical procedure errors occur. Rather than trying to point fingers and identify scapegoats, the central question is: "what went wrong here, and how do we reduce the chances of that happening again?"

Of course, occasionally the answer might be "We hired the wrong person, and we should fire them", but that seems to be only very rarely true.

this is fairly common in the medical field, the usual name for it is "morbidity and mortality" [0]

> The objectives of a well-run M&M conference are to identify adverse outcomes associated with medical error, to modify behavior and judgment based on previous experiences, and to prevent repetition of errors leading to complications. Conferences are non-punitive and focus on the goal of improved patient care.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbidity_and_mortality_confer...

An an organizational ethos, it's hard to argue with a default of "We fail, you succeed."

When failures happen, it's usually the organization rather than the individual that's key to changing.

> But the electorate continues to reward "tough on crime" prosecutors.

Do you believe that people who vote for "tough on crime" prosecutors are seeking harsh punishment of mistakes?

Or do they want criminals acting in malice to have the book thrown at them so other people aren't needless victims?

I don't think "tough on crime" voters strongly differentiate, based on the behaviors of the prosecutors themselves. The biggest resume priority seems to be maintaining a ludicrously high conviction percentage, which is awful for different reasons (innocent defendants forced into plea bargains).

Only a small subset of prosecutors elected in the most liberal districts are rewarded by their constituencies for exercising prosecutorial discretion. I say that without making any judgment as to whether they're using that discretion well — I'm just observing that very few prosecutors work that way.

> I don't think "tough on crime" voters strongly differentiate, based on the behaviors of the prosecutors themselves. The biggest resume priority seems to be maintaining a ludicrously high conviction percentage, which is awful for different reasons (innocent defendants forced into plea bargains).

Well, I think your position is probably one of ignorance. Plenty of people I talk to are for tough prosecution on things like violent crime and against tough prosecution for simple drug possession.

> Only a small subset of prosecutors elected in the most liberal districts are rewarded by their constituencies for exercising prosecutorial discretion. I say that without making any judgment as to whether they're using that discretion well — I'm just observing that very few prosecutors work that way.

Yes, that does seem to be a trend. Prosecutorial discretion is actually important, but it doesn't mean you let crime run rampant, either.

> The biggest resume priority seems to be maintaining a ludicrously high conviction percentage, which is awful for different reasons (innocent defendants forced into plea bargains).

I don't live in a jurisdiction that elect prosecutors, but is this actually a thing? Do candidates/incumbents run campaign ads on their conviction rate? Are voters researching/talking about the conviction rate of the candidates like it's a pissing contest?

Yes. It was true for our current US Vice President, Kamala Harris for example — but she's not an outlier, this happens all the time.

https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/kamala-harris-san-franci...

> If the conviction rate had been measured by actual cases pursued, rather than all cases referred by police, Hallinan said, his office would have had a conviction rate that was relatively similar to Los Angeles and other major cities.

> And Hallinan was getting results. Overall, crime rates were plummeting. Violent crime had gone down close to 60 percent in San Francisco since Hallinan took office.

> Still, the low conviction rate resulted in headline after headline about San Francisco’s permissive attitude toward crime, a media environment harnessed by the Harris campaign.

Worse, the family of the victim had apparently forgiven the nurse for her mistake and didn't want criminal prosecution.

This was driven purely by the state prosecutor.

Do we really want to live in a society where people are not prosecuted because the family of the victim forgave them? So if two people commit the same offence, Person A is not prosecuted because the victim's family forgave him but Person B is because the victims family did not? Was offender B just unlucky on victim selection? The rule and application of law should not be based on the feelings of the victims family. Did the dead person forgive them?

We certainly don't want to ignore them, given they have the most immediate understanding of the situation and entitlement to guilt.

We don't allow plaintiffs to sue without standing. Why do we allow DAs to prosecute without a victim?

The state has a justification to pursue crime, but it seems like that should be limited when there's (no victim) or (victim who disagrees with prosecution).

Is the dead person not a victim? If someone is murdered and their family is like good I hated them anyway does that nullify the existence of a crime? Are we basing prosecution now on the character of the victim? That's a pretty quick path to deciding that certain victims have no value in society.

The dead person is a victim, and in a perfect society we'd just execute the killer. 1:1.

In reality, the justice system is imperfect, inequal access to defense, imperfect identification of killers, etc.

All murder is bad.

But I'd certainly say murdering a good person is worse than murdering a bad one. And if a family, who on average has more incentive to think well of the victim than anyone, doesn't... should that be ignored?

I hear what you are saying but honestly yes it should be ignored. For reasons of both fairness but more importantly I want justice to be blind. I don't want the police or prosecutors to be able to decide that person A was a dick or was a republican or a democrat or white / black so his murder is not as important. It could also lead to situations where the murder of a rich person is prosecuted more harshly than that of a poor one as the rich person donated so much to charity. The law has to be blind and based on clearly defined parameters.

But I feel like discretionary prosecution is already breaking blindness.

And furthermore, perversely-incentivized blindness. Get a high conviction rate, by throwing the book at people charged with "PR bad" crimes, regardless of the individual, and as long as they aren't politically connected and potentially useful in your future political career.

Compared to that motivation of your average DA / USA, "How surviving family feels" doesn't seem worse.

I agree with you in regards to how the current system is not blind and discretionary prosecution is a negative. I am all for pretty much anything that removes a prosecutors ability to give a pass to a preferred class of offender. By that I generally mean police officers. Giving them an additional power to decide the value of a victim based on their family or their biased opinion of goodness is not a net positive and just further greys the area. I hear what you are saying and actually sympathize with it but I think the solution should be to focus on removing as much discretion as possible as it just gives prosecutors and law enforcement decision making power they should not have.

If the entire chain of command is responsible, but only one person responsible for the poor result pays a real price, then is it really justice at all?

I'm not saying the rest of them should not be prosecuted if there was fault further up the chain as well. I agree they should be. In this case the nurse clearly breached many protocols and delivered the killing action so she bears responsibility. If there is a systematic failure then they should pursue that too. Justice is not a decision that well we could not get them all so no point prosecuting anyone.

Consider this: someone drives without paying proper attention and kills someone. It's time for victim impact statements, and relative after relative asks the court for lenience on the driver because the victim was a drunk and a wifebeater, the world is better off without him.

Not sure that that is a good idea, justice is about more than just those immediately affected by a crime

it was the county DA and he's up for reelection this year

Is it though? Should a cop be prosecuted for accidentally killing an innocent civilian in the course of duty during a non violent traffic stop? I would argue that they should be. How many chances should a nurse get to accidentally kill someone? Do they only get prosecuted the second time? Third?

If you are responsible for the death of another person due to your own negligence then you should be prosecuted for a crime and be removed from any scenario where you are able to repeat that mistake.

A cop killing an innocent civilian at a nonviolent traffic stop can pretty much happen only because of malice or negligence. We use the word "accident", but it's never really an accident. If a nurse accidentally kills someone, it may really be an accident.

Furthermore, the nurse is in a profession where people die all the time due to reasons beyond the nurse's control, and surviving relatives are not always rational in who they blame. So nurses will be falsely accused much more often than police.

> A cop killing an innocent civilian at a nonviolent traffic stop can pretty much happen only because of malice or negligence.

This was found to be by recklessness, which is beyond negligence but short of malice.

> We use the word "accident", but it's never really an accident.

Acts due to negligence, and even recklessness, really are accidents.

> Furthermore, the nurse is in a profession where people die all the time due to reasons beyond the nurse's control, and surviving relatives are not always rational in who they blame.

Surviving relatives don't make prosecutorial decisions, nor are they triers of fact in criminal cases.

> So nurses will be falsely accused much more often than police.

That...doesn't follow from what you’ve described, even taking everything preceding it as true.

> A cop killing an innocent civilian at a nonviolent traffic stop can pretty much happen only because of malice or negligence.

I'm not sure this is true, specifically because the difference between a nonviolent traffic stop and a lethal (to the officer) traffic stop can be a split second.

If my keyboard had a 0.01% chance of lethally shocking me... I'm pretty sure that would alter my typing behavior.

You are widely overestimating the risk that cop will be shot in traffic stop. It is much lower then 0.01%.

The biggest cause for police death are traffic accidents.

"can pretty much happen only because of malice or negligence"

Negligence means "failure to take proper care in doing something", which is often just called an accident.

That is exactly what the nurse did, she failed to take proper care and someone died. The nice thing about the law is that what the relatives feel should not matter at all, that's why we are supposed to have impartial prosecutors that review the facts and determine if charges are warranted.

Bottom line, no matter the profession if you fail to take proper care and someone dies as a result, you should be prosecuted and prevented from getting the opportunity to do it again.

>Negligence means "failure to take proper care in doing something", which is often just called an accident.

This is not true, because you're equivocating on the word "proper". An accident is failure to take proper care, where proper care means "care that follows the rules". Negligence is failure to take proper care, where "proper" means "can reasonably be expected". They are not the same thing.

Not really sure where you are getting those definitions from. Proper means proper. The nurse did not follow the rules. The nurse did not provide any of the care that could have been reasonably expected. Fail to see a difference, she failed both of your definitions.

It is possible for there to be rules that someone cannot be reasonably expected to follow.