Assistant District Attorney, Allegheny County, PA

>> Hello, my name is Max Welco. I'm am an assistant district attorney in Allegheny County, and what goes into that is there are about 113 assistant district attorneys in Allegheny County. We are kind of the highest level of criminal law in the County. We're in charge of prosecuting criminals in Allegheny County, and there are different phases to that. Right now, I am doing all the preliminary hearings. It's the initial criminal phase. If someone is charged with a crime, I'm basically the guy shortly after that crime is charged, I'm in the courtroom trying to convince the magistrate that this guy did what we're claiming he did. So there are lots of different levels, and we kind of cycle through that. So I'm a criminal prosecutor. Everyday, we have two sessions. We have a morning session and an afternoon session, and in every session, there's probably about 50 or 60 files, and each one of those files represents a crime, somebody did something like a DUI or an aggravated assault or something minor, like a simple assault, like a bar fight, or something very intense. So we figure out the direction of that file everyday. So for every one of those files, either it gets postponed for some reason, the defendant is unavailable, were victims or witnesses are unavailable, or an officer is sick or on comp for some reason. So we'll move it to a new date. Or the criminal defendant has the right to waive his preliminary hearing. So if you're charged with a crime, it comes up to the prelim, you can say, "You know, I think the Commonwealth, the State here, has enough evidence to get past this low-level, evidentiary hearing, and we're just going to move it on forward. We also take certain crimes that, you know, as a policy measure, we've decided, you know, this isn't the crime of the century. We can reduce this in such a way that we can just get this out of the pipeline right now, but it's always moving, and, you know, we do that for all the cases in the morning, and we do that, again, for all the cases in the afternoon, and it's just insane. It's loud. It's crazy. People are yelling. You have defense attorneys on one side wanting us to do something, or have it go their way, or, you know, we have police officers on the other side. We work directly with the police, you know, giving us input on the cases. So we're constantly having to listen to lots of different people, gather all the information to make the best decision that we can for that specific file.