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Notes -
You don't maximize public benefit by hill-climbing the local righteousness gradient. You have to look at the second and third order implications of policy. A culture of prosecutorial fair play benefits the public in global ways that the earlier incarceration of some lowlife at the margin does not.
First off, I’m not actually certain this is true. I think that a lot of this country’s jurisprudential traditions - particularly the ones introduced from the time of the Warren Court up until the present - create unnecessary and harmful obstacles for prosecutors. In other words, they make it far too easy for guilty men to walk free. I’m far more concerned about this than I am about prosecutors maliciously persecuting innocent normal Americans. You can make slippery slope arguments all you want, but frankly I think we’re so far up the “make things easier for criminals and give prosecutors more hoops to jump through and more chances to accidentally screw up” hill, and therefore so far from the hypothetical “tyrannical and capricious authoritarian hellscape” bottom - that I’m perfectly willing to overlook and forgive prosecutorial errors if it means keeping another worthless scumbag felon behind bars or on the gallows.
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