At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum writes, The Wages of Sin Are....Nothing Much:
Generally speaking, prosecutors are protected from lawsuits even if they break the rules. And generally speaking, this is probably a good thing. The level of prosecutorial abuse that judges routinely tolerate is outrageous, but still, a wave of lawsuits against prosecutors from everyone ever jailed wrongly probably isn't something we need.
But certainly there are limits. How about this, for example?
Prosecutors in the New Orleans district attorney's office had intentionally hidden a blood test that would have unraveled the criminal case against [John] Thompson. By a stroke of luck, a young investigator scouring the crime lab files found a microfiche copy of it. Thompson's blood type did not match. That single piece of evidence led eventually to Thompson being declared innocent of murder.
This came after 14 years on death row and one month before Thompson was scheduled to be executed. A New Orleans jury awarded him $14 million when he sued, but the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. So how did things go?
But oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the fall suggest he may not see a nickel of it. The high court has taken a dim view of suing prosecutors, and in Thompson's case, the court's conservatives led by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. questioned whether the district attorney's office should be held responsible for the misdeeds of a few prosecutors.
This isn't even fancy DNA evidence. Prosecutors deliberately withheld evidence that Thompson had the wrong blood type and blithely sent him to death row. |
Indeed. The Los Angeles Times piece cited by Drum goes on to say:
Researchers who have examined scores of cases of those who were freed because of DNA evidence say misconduct by prosecutors is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions.
Defendants are supposedly protected by the 1963 ruling in Brady vs. Maryland, which told prosecutors they must reveal evidence that could free a criminal defendant.
"The problem is that Brady violations are hidden and can forever remain hidden," said University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett.
Can forever remain hidden. The possible consequences are obvious. Innocent people convicted because prosecutors put their great big legally shielded thumbs on the scales of justice can spend decades in prison and die there. Or, unlike the innocent (and very fortunate) John Thompson, they can wind up with the state's needle in their arm. Who decided that the behavior causing such an outcome gets labeled "misconduct," as if the prosecutors were chewing gum in a classroom instead of kissing off somebody's life in a courtroom?
• • • • •
At Daily Kos on this date in 2004:
Kevin over at CalPundit has a great summary of our bizarre "recovery".
There is something funny about the economy these days, because despite big GDP growth numbers and falling unemployment we're not seeing rising employment, rising incomes, or rises in factory orders. What's more, even the IMF is worried about our budget deficits, the dollar is sliding, and George Bush wants to distract everyone by sending us to Mars.
What's left to say? |