Local opinion: Prosecutor's check and balance more important than ever

What is the role of the prosecutor?

Much has been said, and a great amount of ink has been printed right here in this paper, about the policies, programs, and decisions at the Pima County Attorney’s Office in the last four and a half years.

Our new PCAO administration was born out of the year 2020, which will no doubt go down in the history books as a year of tremendous upheaval and strife in American history. In the middle of a global pandemic, the role of the prosecutor was redefined in that critical era of civil unrest. It was a time when the murder of George Floyd was the final straw for so many communities across the nation, which had been calling for a more transparent and just way forward for our criminal justice system for generations.

I had already filed to run for Pima County Attorney when 2020 with all its brutality and fatality rolled out, and the fallout from George Floyd’s murder served as a demand for a smarter, data-driven, more just system that could better prioritize violent and victim crime while also ensuring that we weren’t losing constitutional rights along the way. Upon arriving into office in January of 2021, we purposefully replaced the old badge as the emblem of the agency and adopted the moniker of The People’s Office.

But I don’t write to you today to talk about particular policies or programs or decisions, but rather to discuss the fundamental role that the prosecutor plays for the community.

At its core, we are a check and balance that is critical to the health and safety of the community and fundamental to democracy itself. Plainly put, the police disrupt and stop harm. Prosecutors must later hold people to account, while also protecting the law, the constitution, and the rights that each of us holds dear. It’s quite the balancing act. Allow me to explain.

Law enforcement and prosecutors have very distinct roles.

Law enforcement is tasked with taking immediate action if it appears more likely than not that a crime is occurring in front of them. That legal standard is called probable cause, and it is intentionally a low standard to promote public safety, especially in moments of emergency.

But thereafter, the prosecutor honors a much higher standard called the substantial likelihood of conviction. This is an absolutely critical distinction, whereby the prosecutor must be able to articulate that a jury of peers in Pima County is substantially likely to convict a person of a felony, because liberty is at stake. Lest we forget, the entire American criminal justice system was built upon the concept that it is better to let 10 guilty men go free than allow an innocent man to suffer incarceration.

Put into context, the national charging rate hovers around 50% and has for decades. What does that look like? It means that about half of the arrests that police bring to D.A.s across the country turn into open prosecution files if a grand jury indicts someone for a felony crime. This is the gatekeeping role of the prosecutor — the check and balance that our criminal justice system was designed for.

How does this play out here at PCAO? I’m glad you asked. It looks like tough, complicated, grueling, satisfying, painful work, all wrapped up into the profession we call prosecution. Our prosecutors acknowledge and honor that our law enforcement partners are first responders, willing to put their safety on the line for the safety of all of us. And the good ones, which is the vast majority, I am here to tell you through observation, honor us back by knowing we have to hold the line on protecting rights. They don’t ask us to blur the line, or bend the rules, or pressure us that “the ends justify the means.” Because if they do, our PCAO prosecutors won’t. And we’ll be the check against that behavior as well.

So now here we are in 2025. And we seem to be reliving 2020 in a new and very disturbing way. At the direction of the President, masked and unnamed and unidentified federal agents are approaching people across the nation at courthouses and on street corners, at work sites and elementary schools because of how they look or what accent they may have, disappearing them.

And so more than ever perhaps in American history, the check and balance that the prosecutor plays comes to the fore.

I will keep suing the feds (successfully so far) to turn federal funding back on to my county department clients: Transportation, Housing, Public Health, and where necessary, I’ll sue the feds to simply get equal access to a murder suspect. No doubt, all of these filings are a first in the history of my agency.

We need the community to trust us, both law enforcement and prosecutors, to be professional and to uphold the law and to stand strong in support of all of our constitutional rights, to the highest degree.

And if ever there was a time when we need the community to trust in its local officials, now is surely the time.

Because the federal government may come for us.

And we must be unified.

And ready.