A Tale of Two Countries: Examining the Regulation of Prosecutorial Discretion and Misconduct in Canada and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The authors – one Canadian, one American – compare and contrast the two countries’ approaches to regulating prosecutorial discretion and misconduct by means other than evidentiary suppression, charge dismissal or other ‘public law’ remedies. Their analysis acknowledges that both countries limit civil remedies for prosecutors’ professional misconduct. The writers consider administrative law as a means of addressing prosecutor behaviours warranting institutional review even when behaviours fall short of evidentiary thresholds for tort liability or other sanctions affecting licensure. The writers discuss the potential value of ad hoc public inquiries and innocence commissions to prosecutorial accountability not necessarily available in other venues discussed. The authors canvass the merits and limitations of each country’s approach to regulating prosecutorial conduct while exploring what each system can teach the other. The paper concludes by preferring the Canadian test for tort liability over its US counterpart; endorsing professional bodies’ existing jurisdiction over prosecutors; and suggesting both countries adopt bifurcated administrative law systems. Such bifurcated systems combine: (i) ad hoc public inquiries for cases of national or systemic importance; and (ii) permanent Innocence Commissions – akin to those formed in the United Kingdom – created for the ongoing review of complaints that examine prosecutor conduct within the broader scope of factors that potentially contribute to miscarriages of justice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".