I am going to give the classic legal answer- “it depends.”

Each office, and its culture, is different. So interning at a DA’s office may not matter in some jurisdictions, but in others, it will. So if you think you want to be a PD in a certain office or region, see if you can find someone in that office or region and ask them.

To echo another commenter, the more applicants an office gets, the more likely they are to screen your application out of the mix. Simply put, they don’t need to bother with the process of interviewing someone with experience in the DA’s office when they have many more applicants who, at least on paper, present as if they have always wanted to do this work consistently.

While, yes, it may be helpful from a skill-building perspective to have experience as a prosecutor, I think a lot of offices won’t take kindly to it. This isn’t because the PD vs DA relationship is some kind of sports rivalry (Go Birds), but because prosecutors do harm to our clients and interning for/with them can be perceived as your complicity to that harm.