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Last Modified on Jul 16, 2026
Plenty of defense attorneys advertise that they used to be prosecutors. Far fewer explain what that experience actually changes about how a case gets handled. The claim by itself is close to meaningless. What counts is whether the years on the other side produced specific, usable knowledge about how the office across the aisle operates.
Matthew Bangerter served as an Assistant Prosecutor in Lake County from 2007 to 2009 before opening a criminal defense practice. What follows is what those years taught him about how the State builds, evaluates, and resolves cases, and how that knowledge gets applied now.
A Prosecutor Is Not a Free Agent
The most common misunderstanding among defendants, and among some defense attorneys, is that the assistant prosecutor standing across the courtroom has unilateral authority over the case. In most offices, that person does not. Plea offers of any significance run through a supervisor or an office policy. Certain charge categories carry standing rules about what may and may not be reduced. The individual prosecutor may personally agree with a proposed resolution and still lack the authority to approve it.
That changes the approach in a practical way. If the person you are negotiating with cannot say yes on their own, the goal is not to persuade them. The goal is to give them something they can carry to the person who can say yes. A defense argument that is compelling in the hallway but cannot survive a two-minute summary to a supervisor is an argument that goes nowhere.
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What Happens to a Weak File
Prosecutors carry heavy caseloads. Files are not evaluated in a vacuum. They are triaged against every other file on the desk, and a case with a real problem in it competes for attention with dozens that do not.
A weak file rarely disappears on its own, though. Nobody wants to be the person who dismissed a case that turns out to be a bigger deal. What a weak file does is become receptive, but only if the weakness is identified clearly enough, and early enough, that it can be acted on before positions harden. The same problem raised on the morning of trial, after the office has invested months and a supervisor has signed off twice, is a problem the State is now motivated to litigate rather than concede.
This is why timing drives so much of the defense strategy at Fortress Law Group. Pretrial investigation is not a formality. Several results in the firm’s public case record turned on problems that surfaced during pretrial investigation and were presented to the prosecutor before trial preparation was underway, which is precisely the window in which a weak file is still capable of being reevaluated.
How Charging Decisions Get Made
Charges are frequently drafted from a police report, under time pressure, by someone who was not at the scene and who will not be the person trying the case. The charging decision reflects what the report said happened. It does not reflect an independent investigation, because at that stage there usually has not been one.
That gap between the report and the underlying facts is where a substantial share of defense work lives. A report that says a client was present is not evidence that the client was present. A report describing a threat with a firearm is not proof a firearm existed. Fortress Law Group has obtained dismissals in cases where pretrial investigation established that the client was somewhere else entirely, that no firearm was ever owned, or that the complaining witness’s account did not hold up. In each instance the charge was accurate as a description of the report and wrong as a description of what happened.
What Prosecutors Are Actually Measured On
The assumption that prosecutors are graded on convictions is too simple. Prosecutors are public officials with an ethical obligation that runs to justice rather than to a win rate, and most take that seriously. But they are also human beings managing risk, docket pressure, and their own credibility inside the office and with the bench.
A prosecutor’s reputation depends heavily on being right. Being reversed, being embarrassed at trial, or pursuing a case that collapses publicly carries a professional cost that a quiet reduction does not. Understanding what a specific prosecutor is actually protecting, in a specific case, is often more useful than any argument about the merits.
Why This Is Important to Your Case
None of this is adversarial in a personal sense. Most prosecutors are conscientious people doing a demanding job under real constraints. The point is narrower: those constraints are knowable, and knowing them changes what a defense attorney does with a file, when he does it, and who he is really talking to when he makes an argument.
If you are facing charges in Lake County, the Cleveland area, or anywhere in Northeast Ohio, contact Fortress Law Group to discuss your case.
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