[This is a true story – but it happened some time in the past.]
A prosecutor told me, “This case doesn’t need to be on the jury docket”. There were several possible reasons for the comment, none mutually exclusive:
I was putting the case on the jury docket
The prosecutor believed it was a slam dunk guilty
The prosecutor believed my client wouldn’t go to trial
The prosecutor thought I was simply stalling the inevitable
Larger jury dockets create more prep work for the State
I’m sure there are other possibilities. I’ve had it said to me, and heard it said to other defense lawyers as well. I felt like saying, “There are only two kinds of cases… those where we agree on a resolution and those that need to be tried.” But I didn’t.
And I didn’t say that again, several months later, when the case was settled with a better resolution than my client had asked for when we put it on the trial docket in the first place.
