Charles M. Silver, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin who says the current system is the product of "a very vibrant market," said any proposal should focus on defendants and their lawyers.
The aggressive charges against not one or two but six officers in the death of Freddie Gray represent an evolution from "a norm in which prosecutors were seen as extremely cozy with police and therefore were enormously reluctant to accuse them," says David Jaros, a University of Baltimore law professor with a focus on defendants' rights.
PRESS RELEASE Insider Trading Case Focuses on Defendant's Character | The judge overseeing the trial of Rajat K. Gupta adhered to his restrictions on evidence related to Mr. Gupta's charitable works.
The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young man named Justin Barker, who was not involved in the nooses incident three months earlier.
STOCKHOLM — Four men went on trial in Denmark on Friday on charges of plotting a shooting spree in late 2010 at a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, with prosecutors suggesting they intended to focus on the defendants' links to Pakistan.
Special grand juries are not always asked to focus on a particular defendant from the start.
Until Wednesday, he had appeared to be a secondary figure, with most of the focus on his co-defendant Russell Defreitas, accused as the mastermind of the plot to blow up the fuel tanks at Kennedy Airport, where he used to work as a cargo handler.
Prosecutors at Hernandez's trial in state Supreme Court in Manhattan focused on the defendant's drug use and on testimony by Dr. Michael First, a psychiatrist at New York-Presbyterian Hospitandand witness for the defense.
J. Patrick Chassaing -- who, along with Ferguson's part-time chief prosecutor Stephanie Karr, works for a law firm that profits off the county's fractured network of small municipalities -- spent much of Rose's trial focused on the defendant's social media posts and attacking his political views.
"If we went to trial against all seven at once, it would give the defendants and defense lawyers a political platform and what we expected to be quite a circuslike atmosphere," she said, adding that she had decided to dismiss charges against the "least culpable" in order to focus on the "most aggressive" defendants.
Rather, the state's briefs tend to focus on the fact that defendants like Howard and Stubbs already challenged West's credibility at trial or in their appeals, and those challenges had already been found lacking by Mississippi's appeals courts.
