Definition
A prosecutor is an official or private party who formally initiates and carries forward a criminal proceeding against an accused person in the name of the government or, in historical practice, in the name of an aggrieved individual. The term encompasses two distinct roles that have largely collapsed into one over time:
1. Public prosecutor. A government officer — variously styled district attorney, state's attorney, county attorney, attorney general, or United States attorney depending on jurisdiction and level — who represents the people or the crown in criminal proceedings. The public prosecutor holds broad discretionary authority over charging decisions, plea negotiations, and the conduct of trial. This is the dominant modern meaning of the term.
2. Private prosecutor. Historically, a private individual — usually the victim or an aggrieved party — who preferred charges against a suspected offender and bore responsibility for advancing the prosecution, often at personal expense. Private prosecution was a normal feature of common-law criminal practice and survives in limited form in some jurisdictions today.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A prosecuting attorney; also, a person such as a complainant or chief witness who institutes prosecution in a criminal proceeding.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who prosecutes or carries on any purpose, plan, or business; the person who institutes and carries on a criminal suit against another in the name of the government. (Citing Blackstone.)
The ordinary-language understanding of "prosecutor" aligns more closely with the legal meaning than most legal terms do, but the gap lies in the second Wiktionary sense. Calling a victim or witness a "prosecutor" reflects historical private-prosecution practice but is legally imprecise in modern American usage, where the role of the victim and the role of the prosecutor are treated as formally distinct. A researcher encountering "prosecutor" in a historical source should not assume it means a state officer.
Common Confusion
PROSECUTOR vs. COMPLAINANT. In older sources and in jurisdictions retaining private prosecution, the complainant who initiates a charge may be called the prosecutor. In modern American practice, the complainant is a witness or victim; the prosecutor is the state's attorney. Conflating them distorts the institutional analysis.
PROSECUTOR vs. PLAINTIFF. In civil procedure, the adverse party who brings suit is the plaintiff. Calling a plaintiff a "prosecutor" in civil context is error, though older sources occasionally used prosecute broadly to mean "pursue a legal action."
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Public prosecutor. A salaried government officer with institutional authority to bring criminal charges. The term covers federal prosecutors (Assistant United States Attorneys), state prosecutors (district attorneys and their deputies), and local officers by whatever title a jurisdiction assigns.
Private prosecutor. A private individual who prefers and advances a criminal charge, historically common in English practice and early American jurisdictions. In jurisdictions where private prosecution survives, the private prosecutor may retain independent counsel to conduct the trial alongside or instead of the public officer.
Special prosecutor / Independent counsel. A prosecutor appointed outside the normal chain of command to investigate specific matters, typically to address conflicts of interest within the regular prosecutorial office. The institutional structure and appointment mechanism vary by jurisdiction.
Why It Matters in Research
The public/private prosecutor distinction is the central trap in this term. Sources from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — and Bouvier's entry reflects this clearly — treat both roles as live and roughly coordinate. A legal dictionary entry or treatise passage calling someone "the prosecutor" before roughly 1850 may mean the private individual driving the case, not a state officer. Misreading this distinction skews research on the development of state criminal authority.
The absorption of private prosecution into public prosecution is itself a major theme in American legal history. Research on that transition will cut across sources on criminal procedure, the role of the attorney general, and the development of the district attorney as an office. These threads are not always indexed under "prosecutor" — check "attorney general," "district attorney," and "information" as complementary access points.
Modern prosecutorial discretion doctrine — the authority to decline prosecution, enter plea agreements, and structure charges — is almost entirely a public-prosecution phenomenon. Historical sources predate this doctrine and will not frame the prosecutor's role in discretion terms. Researchers working on charging discretion should not expect eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century dictionary entries to map onto contemporary doctrine.
Jurisdictional variation in titles creates indexing noise. United States Attorney, District Attorney, State's Attorney, County Attorney, Commonwealth's Attorney, and Attorney General may all refer to the chief public prosecutor at their respective levels. Search strategies should account for this when working across jurisdictions or time periods.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's, Bouvier's, and Burrill's are in close agreement on the core definition: one who prosecutes another for a crime in the name of the government. All three use nearly identical language, suggesting mutual reliance on a common formulation — likely tracing through Blackstone, as Webster's 1913 acknowledges.
Bouvier's is the most useful of the three for historical research because it alone preserves the public/private distinction explicitly. Bouvier notes that the public prosecutor is "an officer appointed by the government to prosecute all offences" and identifies him with the attorney general or deputy, while also recognizing that "every man may become a prosecutor" — preserving the private-prosecution tradition intact. Black's and Burrill's silently elide this distinction, reflecting the later consolidation of prosecution into public hands. A researcher relying only on Black's would have no indication that private prosecution existed as a formal legal category.
What all three historical sources miss: any discussion of prosecutorial discretion, the ethics of the prosecutor's role, or the constitutional dimensions of prosecutorial authority. These are modern preoccupations that developed well after these dictionaries were compiled. The entries define the role structurally (who the prosecutor is) but say nothing about what limits, if any, constrain prosecutorial conduct.
Jurisdictional Note
Private prosecution retains legal vitality in England and Wales, where victims may still bring a private prosecution in certain circumstances. In the United States, private prosecution has been substantially displaced by public prosecution, but a handful of states preserve limited private prosecution mechanisms. Federal criminal practice is exclusively public prosecution. Researchers working comparatively across Anglo-American jurisdictions should not assume American consolidation applies elsewhere.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Criminal Procedure
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Public Officers and the State
Law Mind Encyclopedia — History of Private Prosecution