Definition
A public prosecutor is a government officer charged with initiating and conducting criminal prosecutions on behalf of the state or sovereign. The role is defined by its public character: the prosecutor acts not as a private party seeking redress but as a representative of the people, with a duty to pursue justice rather than merely to secure convictions.
In American practice, the public prosecutor appears under several titles depending on jurisdiction: district attorney, state's attorney, county attorney, commonwealth's attorney, or attorney general (for matters of statewide concern). At the federal level, the United States Attorney for each judicial district performs the prosecutorial function. In England and Wales, the Director of Public Prosecutions heads the Crown Prosecution Service, a centralized prosecutorial body with no precise American equivalent.
The office carries both charging discretion — the power to decide whether and what charges to bring — and trial authority to present the case in court.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
District Attorney / State's Attorney / County Attorney: The most common American form. An elected or appointed county-level officer who prosecutes state criminal offenses within a defined geographic jurisdiction.
United States Attorney: Federal counterpart. Appointed by the President, prosecutes violations of federal criminal law within an assigned judicial district.
Attorney General (prosecutorial function): In some jurisdictions and in federal practice, the attorney general retains authority to prosecute or supervise prosecutions, particularly in matters of statewide or national significance.
Director of Public Prosecutions: The British institutional form. A centralized, career official heading a national prosecution service. Rapalje & Lawrence cross-references this term directly, reflecting the entry's English law orientation.
Prosecutor of the Pleas: An older title found in some American jurisdictions (notably New Jersey) for the county-level public prosecutor. Rapalje & Lawrence flags this term as a synonym, and researchers encountering it in older case law and statutes should treat it as functionally equivalent to district attorney.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term "public prosecutor" functions primarily as a generic descriptor in legal literature and is rarely the operative title in primary sources. Researchers should not expect to find "public prosecutor" as the formal party designation in American case captions or statutory text — those sources will use the jurisdiction-specific title (district attorney, state's attorney, etc.). The generic term appears most frequently in treatises, law review literature, comparative law scholarship, and constitutional commentary.
Two research traps are worth flagging:
First, English and American sources use the term differently. In English law, "public prosecutor" often refers specifically to the Director of Public Prosecutions or prosecutions brought through that institutional channel, as opposed to private prosecutions (which English law historically permitted far more freely than American law). When reading English cases or treatises — particularly those pre-dating the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 — the distinction between public and private prosecution carries real procedural weight. American sources generally assume all criminal prosecutions are public, so the modifier goes unremarked.
Second, historical American sources through the nineteenth century reflect significant jurisdictional variation in how the prosecutorial function was organized — some jurisdictions relied heavily on the attorney general, others on locally elected prosecutors, and private prosecution by crime victims had not fully disappeared. Rapalje & Lawrence's cross-reference structure (pointing to District Attorney and Prosecutor of the Pleas rather than defining the term independently) reflects this fragmentation: there was no single unified American conception of the public prosecutor as an institution.
For constitutional research, the public prosecutor's charging discretion has been the subject of substantial doctrine under equal protection and separation of powers principles, but the term itself rarely appears in those constitutional cases — researchers will need to follow the functional concepts (prosecutorial discretion, selective prosecution) rather than the label.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines the public prosecutor functionally — as an officer whose role is the prosecution of criminal actions or actions partaking of a criminal nature — without specifying title or institutional form. This is appropriate as a generic entry but signals that Black's is treating the term as a cross-jurisdictional umbrella rather than a term of art with defined legal content of its own.
Rapalje & Lawrence decline to define the term independently at all, instead redirecting to Director of Public Prosecutions, District Attorney, and Prosecutor of the Pleas. This structure is informative: it tells the researcher that in the late nineteenth century, "public prosecutor" was understood as a descriptive category containing jurisdiction-specific forms, not as a freestanding legal concept. The cross-reference to Public Purpose in the same entry block is a pagination artifact with no substantive connection.
Neither source addresses the discretionary authority that has become the dominant doctrinal concern of modern prosecutorial scholarship. The constitutional dimensions of prosecutorial charging discretion, the duty of disclosure, and the ethical obligations distinguishing a prosecutor from a private advocate are largely twentieth-century and twenty-first-century developments not reflected in these historical entries. Researchers using historical dictionaries to understand the modern public prosecutor's constitutional role will find them substantially incomplete.
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Jurisdictional Note
The United States has no single model for the prosecutorial function. Most felony prosecutions are handled by locally elected county-level officers, while federal prosecutions run through presidentially appointed U.S. Attorneys. England and Wales moved to a centralized career service in 1985. Comparative law research must be careful not to map institutional assumptions across systems — the American elected prosecutor has accountability mechanisms and institutional independence that differ fundamentally from a civil-service prosecution model.
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