Eighteenth Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers has created an unusual incentive for her felony prosecutors, paying them bonuses if they achieve a predetermined standard for conviction rates at trial.

The threshold for an assistant district attorney to earn the average $1,100 reward: Participate in at least five trials during the year, with 70 percent of them ending in a felony conviction. Plea bargains or mistrials don’t count.

Chambers, whose office handles prosecutions in Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties, said she set up the standard to encourage her team to meet minimum requirements in line with statistics in comparable jurisdictions. The bonus pool, which comes from an office surplus, and the use of standards to determine who gets part of it are similar to incentive compensation used in private industries.

“It is hard to find performance standards by which to measure trial attorneys,” Chambers wrote in response to questions submitted by e-mail. “This is the standard I think best meets the need to have a performance standard that attorneys know and can be aware of and that does not in any way encourage any outcome in any specific case.”

But other Colorado district attorneys say they neither typically award bonuses nor tie performance evaluations to a conviction goal.

And public defenders said they worry that a prosecutor just shy of the mark might be tempted to drive a harder bargain to force a case to trial to gain the bonus rather than in the interest of justice.

Chambers used the criteria for the first time in 2010 and defended it in a Dec. 7 e-mail to her staff.

“To reply to some of the emails I have received: this is a trial office. I don’t think that comes as a surprise to anyone,” Chambers wrote. “If you are doing the job, you are going to necessarily go to trial. We plea bargain most of our cases so that we can try the others.”

She said in the interview that attorneys assigned to more complicated or lengthy cases were exempt from the requirement and that the e-mails show she granted four exceptions for people who pitched in in other ways.

Her 18th Judicial District staff members won felony convictions in 69 percent of their trials last year, according to data from the State Court Administrator’s Office.

That’s a few points behind Jefferson and Boulder counties, and on par with Denver and Adams counties, though none have taken similar steps.

Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey said he’s seen plenty of cases where hard work didn’t pay off in the jury box and added that he’d be concerned about unintended consequences of a rule like Chambers’.

“I would worry that if something is tied to a conviction rate, a deputy wouldn’t try a hard case that required a trial. We want people trying cases that need to be tried,” Morrissey said. “If they don’t win, they don’t win.”

Several officials from other jurisdictions said that a deputy district attorney’s job is far too complicated to boil down to a conviction rate.

Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett looks at attorneys’ ethical standards, how they juggle their dockets and move cases along, their relationships with local law enforcement, and whether they take cases to trial. But he hasn’t set a quota.

“I want my department in trial as much as possible, but I want them focused on doing the right thing on their cases,” Garnett said. “I don’t want them distracted by some kind of bonus or award.”

Garnett pointed to the same American Bar Association directive for prosecutors as State Public Defender Doug Wilson did. In essence: Seek justice, not merely conviction.

“If you’re to seek justice and yet your pay is based on the number of cases you take to trial or your conviction rate, then it clouds your discretion,” Wilson said. “They have an incentive not to make a reasonable disposition if they need one more trial or another conviction in order to get a bonus.”

Chambers said she carefully set the standard low enough so that prosecutors aren’t cherry-picking easy cases from their 150 to 175 cases a year and high enough to demonstrate that they have certain trial skills and good judgment. In Chambers’ view, most, if not all, of her assistants are likely to have at least five cases a year where justice can’t be achieved through a plea agreement and that end up at trial.

“If a prosecutor does not have five cases . . . that are just to take to trial, then that prosecutor has an ethical obligation not to try those cases and do justice,” Chambers wrote. “I would expect that prosecutor to ask for an exemption . . . and I would grant it.”

Chambers said she expects to continue using the benchmark, though the state’s fiscal problems may deplete the surplus she has used to pay the bonuses.

Jessica Fender: 303-954-1244 or jfender@denverpost.com

This story has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to inaccurate information provided to The Denver Post, the rates of felony convictions in trials in metro-area jurisdictions were overstated in a chart with this story. Denver reached felony convictions in 65 percent of its felony trials; Jefferson County, 58 percent; Arapahoe County, 58 percent; Adams County, 53 percent; and Boulder County, 51 percent.