As my 2 or 3 regular readers might recall, I work for a county prosecutor’s office . . . but only as a paper-pusher. I have nothing to do with deciding who is charged with criminal offenses, and how they should be prosecuted and then sentenced if they admit to guilt or are found guilty in a court of law. (And that’s just as well.) But I stand in awe of the people do. They’re making major decisions; get it wrong one way and you let a dangerous person free amidst society (and encourage others to commit that crime). Get it wrong the other way and you can ruin an innocent life. And they’re making a whole lot of these decisions, with around 100 new criminal cases pushed into our system each day.

I really don’t have any indication just how good or bad my employer is doing in that regard. I’ve never seen or heard of any “quality control” studies of the office. I don’t even know if there’s any way of doing such a study. I’ll have to leave that to the criminology people, and to the voice of the public.

But I did read recently about a case where someone in my office made what turned out to have been the right decision regarding charges and sentencing. That was in a book called “The Pact”, about three young doctors from the badest parts of Newark, NJ who made a mutual agreement in high school to stick together and help each other get through college and grad school as to become doctors. “The Pact” is triple-autobiographical, which each doctor telling their part of the story and adding their perspective on what they did together.

In one of Sam’s chapters (Dr. Sampson Davis), he tells us how he was arrested during the summer before his senior year in high school (in 1990). He and the other two pact members (Dr. George Jenkins and Dr. Rameck Hunt) had already taken their vows by then and were about to apply to college. But during summer break, Sam fell in with some other pals from his neighborhood who came up with a money-making idea: they’d drive around at night with a gun and rob drug vendors on the street. Sam was the get-away driver. Of course, it worked for a while and the money flowed in; but one night the local police just happened to stumble upon their little venture. Sam was soon in the youth lock-up, charged with armed assault.

Sam’s family was poor, but managed to scrape up enough to get him a lawyer. The lawyer started bargaining with our Juvenile Division and Family Court. Before too long, they had an agreement: the kid will serve one year. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, that would have removed Sam from the pact hardly a year after it’s making. You really have to wonder if George and Rameck would have carried on after that early setback, despite their best intentions. Had this decision held, perhaps none of them would be doctors today. As they tell you in the book, the call of the streets was loud and incessant for all of them.

However, after a while, the Juvenile Division in the Prosecutor’s Office agreed to a different outcome: suspended sentence and probation. Sam would be back with the other two pact members by opening day of senior year and would apply for college right along with them. With 20/20 hindsight, it was clearly the right decision. Sam was the driver, he didn’t possess the weapon, didn’t have a record, was doing well in a special high school for university-bound students (this is Newark, remember), and was otherwise ready to apply for college. Was Sam a threat to society, or did he just make a knucklehead decision under the stress of a bad environment, one he was on the verge of leaving?

Someone in my office knew how to frame that question and correctly answer it for Sam. And they were able to answer it quickly, given the case volumes we handle; they couldn’t leisurely read a book about his life and times, as I recently did. I have no idea who the Assistant Prosecutors were who handled Sam’s case; I wasn’t working there at the time and hardly anyone from those days is still there today. But I thought I’d add something about those anonymous lawyers as a footnote to the story behind “The Pact” (which is a good book, definitely worth a read). Had those “APs” made the wrong call back in 1990, the book may have never been written, and George Jenkins, Sampson Davis, and Rameck Hunt might have just been three more lives lost to the cruelties of Newark’s streets and jails.

So . . . I wonder if there are any ghetto kids out there making pacts to go thru law school together to become prosecutors?