YOUR NOV. 1 editorial “Let juries determine sex offenders’ fate’’ supports Middlesex District Attorney Gerard Leone’s effort to guarantee for prosecutors the right to a jury trial in sex offender commitment cases. At the same time, it turns a blind eye to the fact that, on a daily basis, Leone (and every other district attorney) administers a comprehensive system of carrots and sticks designed to see that no ordinary criminal defendant gets to put his or her case to a jury.
Choose a guilty plea, and the prosecutors will recommend a more lenient sentence; go to trial, and you will have to pay a “trial tax’’ and risk a more lengthy (sometimes doubled) sentence.
The motivation for prosecutors in both cases isn’t the public acceptance of verdicts that the Globe craves; rather, it is the simple question “Who wins?’’ In the ordinary criminal case the goal is no jury verdict at all.
I’m happy to have juries decide in both classes of case. Will the Globe and Leone join me in an amendment that forbids any prosecution practice that inhibits criminal defendants’ exercise of their jury trial rights?
James M. Doyle
Brookline
The writer practices criminal law in Boston and directs the Center for Modern Forensic Practice of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
