Marybeth Bates
Joel Feinman of the Pima County Public Defender’s Office returns to the Democratic Club of Quail Creek on January 19, 2019. The meeting will be held in the Madera Club’s Silver Room at 3:00 p.m. and is also the club’s annual meeting.
Feinman contends “The most powerful person in the American criminal justice system today is not the police officer or the judge, but the prosecutor. Prosecutors have near-total control over who gets charged with what crimes and, because of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, it is the prosecutor and not the judge who determines the sentence. Fordham University researcher and law professor John Pfaff has traced the crises of mass incarceration to the prosecutor’s largely unchecked power. Come hear more about the prosecutor’s critical, yet still largely overlooked, role in the criminal justice system.”