I took German long enough ago to trust Google better than my own memory... it was a minor nit before, now it's even minor-er.
Anyway, if it's Die Staatsanwaltschaft which the possessive applies to, that's a feminine noun anyway (in German nouns have either masculine, feminine, or neuter gender), so I think that ihre is used either because the noun is feminine or because the person being talked about is female. IANA grammatician.
But I wrote "the prosecutor" and not "the prosecution".
Shouldn't it be really "her" then, if the prosecutor is a woman, like in this case? Now I'm confused?
The gender of the person might not change the gender of the noun that refers to it (I'd suppose the noun's gender is actually fixed.) But, possessive pronouns might not care about the gender of the noun in cases where a person is the referent and the person's gender is known. It seems (intuitively, and as a grammarian you should be innately used to discarding your intuition since it's often going to be irrelevant) if the gender of the person is known, it should take the correct gender of personal pronouns. But it might be more important that the word for prosecutor in the sentence actually has an (innate) feminine gender?
That's why you should be confused, same as I am.
If I had to guess, prosecutor is a noun that is either masculine or feminine depending on the gender of the referent, but if I had to second-guess, I'd say that's in fact probably wrong and nouns always have concrete genders of their own. Hopefully someone knows and comes along to tell us both, I'm curious now.
I agree with the interpretation that it's "its mind", referring back to the grammatically feminine "Staatsanwaltschaft". The individual prosecutor in this case would be referred to as a Staatsanwältin, and one of her male counterparts would be a Staatsanwalt. leo.org defines Staatsanwaltschaft only as: public prosecutor's office, department of public prosecution, office of the district attorney (etc.), making it clear that it refers to a government agency or competency rather than an individual person.
Edit: German Wikipedia agrees:
Ein Staatsanwalt (Kürzel StA, weibliche Form: Staatsanwältin), in manchen Staaten auch Procurator, Procureur bzw. Prosecutor genannt, ist bei Gericht oberster Vertreter der Anklage.
Die Staatsanwaltschaft (StA) in Deutschland ist eine weisungsgebundene Behörde, die für die Strafverfolgung und -vollstreckung zuständig ist und als solche ein Teil der Rechtspflege ist.
I also had a brainfart and incorrectly assumed that the gender of the noun in German has anything to do at all with the English translation. I guess it wouldn't matter, all that matters is does the pronoun refer to a person personally, or "the prosecution" which is a non-human neutral entity in English.
Whether it translates "her" or "its" depends entirely on what the rest of the sentence means in English, the fact that nouns in German are gendered and this one is innately feminine does not even enter into the equation.
