For the First Time, a Prosecutor Will Go to Jail for Wrongfully Convicting
huffingtonpost.com
huffingtonpost.com
I know that I'm sort of oversimplifying here but the key take away here is that prosecutor has absolutely nothing to lose! Well OK, he could end up losing the case but that's nothing compared to what accused stand to lose. There needs to be a counterbalance to the power wielded by prosecutors, and this is a good start!
There was one death penalty case he saw in that time and while conviction was, as always a certainty, a separate hearing decides "special circumstances" (execution) or just life in prison. To "help the judge make the right decision" the court room was packed to overflowing with a silent audience who obviously universally wanted the death penalty. So two defendants were sentenced to death for a single murder that day.
That seems very wrong.
By the way, the single case that did not end in conviction was of a black preacher accused of child molestation who had an all black jury.
And I'll bet most people reading this, trained by tv media's spectacular "everyone is guilty", are instantly and irreversibly convinced he actually was guilty just based on that one above sentence.
But if you don't believe me (as you obviously do not) please do take 5 minutes to call a random criminal defense attorney in LA and ask the conviction rate once the defendant enters a not guilty plea.
They literally didn't even know what the crime actually was and were already ready to convict.
It made me realize I never want to go before a jury if I'm innocent (not sure if a judge is better or not, haven't experience on that end).
The assistant Principal started discussing my punishment and I chimed in that I didn't do what I was accused of doing.
He said that the teacher wouldn't have used her time to send me to the office if I hadn't done what she said I did.
I said that the reason we have trials is because sometimes the authorities make mistakes.
He looked at me as if I had spoken to him in a foreign language.
Most people actually are guilty of the crimes they are charged with, and simply want to do their time and move on. A few are innocent, and most of them successfully defeat the charges against them, though it's not a popular topic online because it shatters the prevailing narrative. A very small portion of defendants that are innocent get convicted, usually because of their lawyer's incompetence and not because of overwhelming prosecutorial misconduct. The innocent defendants who plead guilty have themselves to blame--either they hired bad counsel, or they made the choice to plead despite the advice of counsel.
This is not to say that prosecutorial misconduct does not occur -- it happens quite frequently. But it's not something that most prosecutors engage in and it's very rarely something that affects the outcome of a case.
Additionally, many prosecutors, police and people in the criminal justice system believe that, even if the defendant is ambiguously guilty of the crime they are on trail for currently, they are certainly guilty of other crimes they are not currently on trial for. Thus shading information to get a conviction in an ambiguous case is sometimes viewed as a public service. Interestingly this part of problem is not the result of malice or even ambitious DAs.
Judges don't convict, juries do.
Just thought I'd clear that up.
So each party in a case decides whether or not to have a jury based on these points.
To a limited extent, attorneys can ask to change judges. Judges are embarrassed when they are "papered" this way so this provides pressure not too be absurdly biased.
And finally, there are a few differences in laws and huge differences in both judges and jury around the US both in opinions and education level. Dare I say this is why patent cases all end up in East Texas.
I noticed this about 20 years ago. Campaign ads for judges usually focused on how "tough on crime" they were as opposed to how "fair and trustworthy" they were.
I lost what little respect I had for the legal system when I watched a prosecutor argue that two convicted men should remain in prison and one should remain on death row despite newly discovered exculpatory DNA evidence and new evidence of police and jury misconduct because "The system" needed finality.
http://litigation.findlaw.com/going-to-court/judge-versus-ju...
>Plea bargaining in the United States is very common; the vast majority of criminal cases in the United States are settled by plea bargain rather than by a jury trial.[1][2] They have also been increasing in frequency—they rose from 84% of federal cases in 1984 to 94% by 2001.[3]
Also note judges don't have to accept plea bargains.
If it came to that, a trial by judge versus a trial by jury might have a better outcome than relying on a group of laymen who just want to go home to decide your fate.
That seems untrue. http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2015-Court-Statistics-Rep...
I'm looking at page 47 (72 in the pdf). ~13% of felonies that make it to court result in acquittal, dismissal or transfer.
There are a lot of caveats, including but not limited to: this is only felony cases (there are about 4x as many misdemeanours as felonies, but I can't immediately see statistics for them); I don't know what transfer means.
But even with those caveats, my current guess is that your father didn't see a representative sample.
Table 1 gives the ten-year average 1996-2005 for California as 84% criminal conviction rate.
http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
55% conviction rates when tried in front of a judge, 84% conviction rates when tried in front of a jury.
Acquittal rates will also tend fall as the gravity of the charges/court falls--but a lot of that is explained by the prosecution being far more ready to drop charges (or choose not to charge at all) in close cases when the crime is seen as less serious. A marginal murder case, for example, might be pursued even though a just as marginal shoplifting case would not be.
Japan, for example, has a 99% conviction rate but Ramseyer attributes much of that to the fact that prosecution offices are so understaffed and under-resourced there that they can manage to bring only the strongest of cases.[1] So you're much better off in a place like that because if you have a marginal case you won't even have to go to trial to be acquitted--the charges will be dropped beforehand.
[1] http://legalombudsman.up.seesaa.net/image/199820Why20is20the...
To get a better understanding we would have to ask whether persons convicted under even the most careful trials (death penalty cases) are later exonerated eg https://www.aclu.org/dna-testing-and-death-penalty
We might also ask whether jurors enter the courtroom convinced the defendant is guilty before the trial even starts. Even here it might a coincidence: the defendants are always guilty anyway so the prejudice of the juries is irrelevant. Or we have to convince ourselves that prejudiced jurors always become open minded somewhere between voir dire and jury instruction. I suggest the later is not too believable and the former outright disturbing.
We would have to explain why federal courts have significantly lower conviction rates than lower courts by saying something like lower court prosecutors prepare their cases better or federal judges are significantly more lenient. Intuitively neither explanation seems very satisfying.
Finally we'd have to explain how charges that a DA is willing to drop during a plea bargain are then proven beyond a reasonable doubt at trial and explain how such a system, however money saving, has anything to do with justice.
Ideally, given that the number of innocent people jailed is not zero, we'd determine objectively and openly what the number is and whether we are satisfied with that rate.
2. Again, the metric is too coarse. It's not a random representative sampling of all accused criminals who make it through a full trial - the prosecution is like a football team that has the power to call off the match at any point up until the last minute if it looks like they might lose. We shouldn't be surprised that they tend to win when they choose not to do so.
3. This is well-studied and very intuitive: the more serious (and newsworthy) the charges, the more personal and political pressure to pursue a case, even a marginal one. You don't consider this possibility when speculating why federal courts have lower conviction rates.
4. A bargain requires both sides to give something up - if the prosecutor would only let you plea to the charge/punishment he thinks you'd get at trial no ones would ever plead out!
And even if there was no possibly of conviction at trial, then how is it just to try to jail the accused anyway with a bluff and threat? Presumably the DA alone has decided the defendant is guilty but believes the trial system is broken so has taken it on himself to try to incarcerate the accused.
Yet all other western nations have far greater restrictions on plea bargains, the UK disallows plea bargains all together. Yet their societies have not collapsed nor become overrun with violent crime.
2. The DNA testing of death row inmates is indeed biased but not in direction you imagine. Many states simply do not allow DNA tests of convicted persons solely because it would reopen too many cases. Likewise is is also necessarily limited to those for which DNA evidence exists.
But even if the aclu testing were 100% biased toward exoneration and even if every single innocent person has now been exonerated by it, both of which are impossibly unlikely, it still means at least 17 innocent people were on death row. Even at that rate there is a far higher percentage of innocent people on death row than citizens murdered in the street. By orders of magnitude.
Even if it were just 17, it means there were more innocent Americans on death row than have died in terrorist attacks this entire decade. If we know there are terrorists in the world then we should at least be aware there is something wrong with parts of the trail system.
4.>if the prosecutor would only let you plea to the charge/punishment he thinks you'd get at trial no ones would ever plead out!
This is why it is done not why it is a good thing to do. We would never justify torture on the grounds it gets more defendants to plead out. So the question is, where is the line of too much coercion and is it currently crossed. I'd suggest where one draws that line is influenced buy whether you're already convinced every accused person is guilty and all the expense of trials is really just a waste of money.
I remember a few years ago an Australia jailed for drugs in Indonesia explaining that she pleaded guilty while maintaining innocence in Australian media because "this is how it works here." IE, the system expects you to admit guilt and apologize, else face a much worse outcome. I thought "That's how it works everywhere."
This is not just across countries, it's across time. Confession has almost always been a part of the legal process. It's been necessary for mercy (plea bargain) and it's been extracted through torture, manipulation and any other means possible. Nearly every witch during the English witch hunts pleaded guilty and grassed on other witches.
I suspect that the same thing was going in the squares of Jericho 400 generations ago.
The concept of a trial where the accused defends, prosecutors accuse and the juries or judges decide is an idealization and/or a back-up plan. Even if we wanted to do this in all cases, we couldn't afford to. Modern judicial processes are too expenses to be used in all but a minority of cases.
I don't think we can fix this wholesale at this point.
Fix: Put me on the jury. E.g., the OP mentions that at the start of a trial, the judge can issue an "ethical rule order" which says that the prosecutor and police must provide to the defense all evidence that might help the accused.
No ethical rule order? With me on the jury, tough to get a conviction.
Prosecutor offered the accused a plea bargain but now wants to convict of a much more serious crime? Nope: On the jury, I won't convict of anything more serious than the plea bargain offer.
Prosecutor presents evidence from the police lab? I will have to work really hard not to LOL.
Prosecutor presents DNA evidence? Just shake my head and know that the chances of that evidence being correct are zip, zilch, and zero.
Prosecutor talks about probabilities? Accused goes free. Even if 20 million people have jaywalked, even if from a simple random sample 99 44/100% of people have jaywalked, that still is zip, zilch, and zero evidence that the accused jaywalked.
Police give testimony? Ha! In practice the police are perfectly free to lie under oath without any risk of being accused of perjury. Ignore all testimony of police. E.g., police found drugs in the accused car? Might have been planted by the police. Maybe the situation is just that the accused had some cash and the police just wanted to steal it. Can't trust the police.
Accused is poor? Police love to go after poor people, guilty or not.
He replaces an imperfect legal process with his personal whims and his "fuck the authorities" attitude.
If others followed him they'd be starting a new age of "la terreur".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10368962
At least it's not copy pasted, but the guy's solution is always to put himself on the jury.
That's basically why we have juries. I'm basically just saying that I would perform the role of a juror, maybe even a relatively skeptical juror.
I know very well that the police, prosecutor, and judges like to get convictions. Well, instead, as a citizen and juror, I like to get justice. E.g., if the system is unjust, I may be its next victim. I don't like to see injustices.
I know well that the police, prosecutor, and judge are pursuing their careers and are getting paid to do that. In particular, they are getting paid, getting publicity, promotions, progress in politics, etc. from getting convictions that indicate that they are solving crimes. And I know that they get paid the same whether the defendant is really guilty or innocent with essentially never any negative consequences for convicting an innocent person. And I know enough about human nature in a system to know that such people will sleep just fine convicting an innocent person because they can blame that on the system. Where such people can get into trouble is with an acquital, again, the same whether the defendant was guilty or innocent. So, net, those people want to convict and are ready, willing, able, and eager to lie, cheat, suppress or manufacture evidence, cut deals with convicted persons to get testimony, etc. to get convictions. It's adversarial, that is, a fight, right?
In particular, no way do I want some non-objective people out to rack up convictions, get headlines, promotions, reelections, votes for the mayor from being "tough on crime", have an easy way to claim that a case is "solved", etc. convict an innocent person.
I'm arriving at the court room with no preconceived notions about the guilt or innocence of the defendant but with a lot of strong notions about the adversarial nature of the mud wrestling match I'm about to view.
So, to get a conviction, the police and prosecutor will have to make a solid case and where I know that they are not objective, fair, honest, or interested in justice.
That the police and prosecutor brought the case cuts no ice with me, doesn't for a second make me suspect that the defendant is guilty.
And for a conviction, emotional appeals will seriously hurt the case of the police and prosecutor. My career is in math, with theorems and proofs, and computing: I long since concluded that emotional screaming does not a math proof make or a software bug fix.
E.g., there's the line in The Social Network where the lawyer tells Zuck that with some little remark he has "already lost the jury". Well, not with me. I don't care what the heck emotional this, gut twisting that, subtle some other thing, passion, pathos, poignancy, drama, etc.: I'm no more emotional than that granite column out front. I can work hard not to be emotional until there's a chance of convicting an innocent person.
Or, the prosecutor claims that the defendant has a rap sheet a mile long and has had various convictions before. But in this trial the question is what did the defendant do this time. To bring in the past of the defendant is clearly an attempt to bring emotion, maybe vengeance, retaliation, or retribution, into the case. Okay, prosecutor: I'm not convicting based on emotion, and you just lost your trust from me for objectivity, fairness, and rationality.
Sure, the judge can tell the jury this and that, but as a juror I'm still free to ignore what the judge says and obligated to vote as I see fit and not give reasons. The decision just is not up to the police, prosecutor, and judge. Instead, the decision is up to the jury. However important the police, prosecutor, and judge believe they are, the real responsibility is in the hands of the jury.
The Founding Fathers no doubt expected that 12 disinterested citizens would come to better decisions than hardly objective people interested in publicity, politics, promotions, etc.
With a juror, even the letter of the law doesn't have to count: If a juror believes that the law is absurd, then the juror is free to vote to acquit.
It's called the jury system. If I have to serve, I'll try to be a good juror.
If the judge can tell a juror how they must vote, then we don't need a jury. Else we have a jury, and the jurors get to vote.
Maybe the judge instructs the jurors to consider this, ignore that, on and on. But still a juror gets to vote and for reasons they don't have to explain.
It's our jury system. Maybe some lawyers, judges, etc. have had lots of biggie ideas about this and that legal detail about what would, could, should be the case for juries, instructions to the jurors, all sorts of this and that. Still a juror gets to sit in the jury box, watch the trial, think, think for themselves, and then vote and not explain their vote.
Suggests that either most witches didn't confess or that those proven by confession to be witches were not executed. It gives ~5000 in UK and America brought to trial and ~1500-2000 executed. In the case of the trials I can find easy documentation for - Pendle and North Berwick - it seems all who confessed were executed but that some of those executed maintained their innocence. Not all of them implicated others. At least one maintained innocence under torture and apparently to death.
Anecdotal contradiction of your assertion but it does put some doubt about it; could you cite your source then for this?
In any case, the relevant ration should be confessions/convictions, not convictions/accusations.
Then don't punish except in the minority of cases. We put too many people in prison as is.
We also wouldn't have the situation where prosecutors let wealthy and influential people off the hook and then later claim, "hey, it was the best plea deal we could get."
In other words, if you don't take the plea deal, you're punished whether you're guilty or innocent.
An innocent man lost 25 years of his life and the man who caused this eventually, after a reasonably successful career lost what may as well equate to some vacation time...
Am I the only one who is horrified at this? Okay, so he got more than a slap on the wrist, but what the fuck is this?! That's bullshit! Pardon my linguistics, but my horror at this injustice leaves me short for words.
The only restitution that would make this even marginally okay is if the prosecutor/judge had been required to:
- House the convicted man.
- Set him up with training that would allow the convicted to re-integrate meaningfully into today's society.
- Assist the man to find meaningful and gainful employment.
- Set him up with a pension plan that would have been equivalent to see him through retirement.
- Set him up for success in the manner in which he would have been able to provide for himself had he been a free man.
- Feed him, clothe him and pay his utility bills until such a time as his income would allow him to successfully stand on his own two feet.
Even then, he owes this man 25 years of his service to make up for what was taken from him. If that bankrupts his accuser, so be it.
>Am I the only one who is horrified at this?
No.
The author frames it as meaningful punishment, and is the director of the Ohio Innocence Project. I'm not sure I totally agree, but compared to zero punishment in the past, this is a major improvement.
Is that because they threatened him with the death penalty if he didn't accept the plea? <irony />
[1] http://www.innocenceproject.org/news-events-exonerations/pre... ("Anderson did not turn over a transcript of the victim’s mother telling an investigator that Morton’s 3-year-old son Eric had told her that Morton was not the attacker and other evidence pointing to a third party assailant.")
10 days for ruining at least two lives?
Sometimes the exculpatory evidence can be clear-cut and you can conclude that the prosecutor knew the defendant was innocent and still went forward with the prosecution. Those cases merit very severe punishment. But here, the main piece of withheld evidence was a statement by the victim's mother about a statement by the victim's three-year old child. The statement itself was inadmissible hearsay.
It should have been disclosed, but does failure to do so really rise to the level of malicious intent to prosecute someone Andersen "knew" to be innocent?
The article claims this is the first time a prosecutor has been incarcerated.
You can reasonably argue that there is a difference in severity between e.g. withholding evidence and manufacturing evidence, but that difference is only worth so much when they both predictably cause the same outcome. And a term of incarceration of five days... it could be twenty times that long and still be overly lenient.
The original comment in the HN thread said that. The article did not.
That's irrelevant. The prosecutor chose to withhold the evidence to further his case. Even if he wasn't sure the suspect was innocent, he cannot claim he acted in good faith when he knowingly withholds evidence. As a prosecutor he knows very well he should present all the evidence he has. It is not his job to judge what's relevant and what's not.
His failure notwithstanding, is there some reason why the defense didn't call the son to testify as a witness in court? Not trying to defend Anderson, but genuinely curious.
Also, I think this thread seems to be overly focused on eye-for-an-eye justice and laying the blame solely on the prosecutor (e.g. comments that he should be personally liable for compensation), but it seems to me that the entire justice system failed Morton, not just this one transgression. Morton received a lump sum for every year served, a lifetime annuity of $80k, job training, and educational aid.
Nothing in the world is going to give him those 25 years back, including bankrupting or imprisoning the prosecutor, but at least he was compensated in some way.
However, I will admit I was fairly disgusted by Anderson's plea bargain, not just because he deserved a harsher punishment but because it's not exactly a strong deterrent to prevent this sort of thing in the future (though perhaps the Michael Morton Act may help in that regard).
I don't know about anyone else, but if I'm murdered, avenging my death isn't going to help my family. I wouldn't want him to see a day of jail time. Make my murderer go to the lengths I do to take care of my family every single day for the rest of his life, just as I would have had I not been murdered. This man lost 25 years of his life. The judge guilty of that should be responsible for fixing that. The system may be partially to blame here, but you cannot tell me that a man smart enough to be a public prosecutor couldn't discern that he was exploiting the weaknesses of that system for his own gain without regard for the human cost to this man and his family - and his wife's family?
If you do something bad that fucks up someone's life, it should be on you to help fix that as best it can be fixed. This isn't an eye for an eye, this is doing what's right.
Make him fix it.
You (the hypothetical you, not the real you) are responsible for your own actions. The company doesn't control how you act, you do. It's fair enough that the company is held accountable, but you should be equally held accountable for willful negligence, gross misconduct, unprofessional conduct etc. etc. That's on you.
Just because this prosecutor is a Government official, doesn't immediately remove his culpability, nor his accountability. He was wilfully negligent and ruined an innocent man's life. The Government didn't do that, he did that. It should be on him to fix it. He should be held accountable to the extent of his means to make it right. If it is beyond his means to make it right, it should then fall to the Government to provide the shortfall.
Think about this individual case. Did Ken Anderson end up in this prison because the prosecutor was personally out to get him? I don't think so. I think he ended up in prison because of a system that is "tough on crime" and is designed to heavily incentivize high conviction rates sometimes to the extent that it produces wrongful convictions.
Did he convict an innocent man due to his own wrongdoing and did he knowingly withhold evidence? Clearly.
Did he prove that he was coerced into this behavior in some way, thus proving entrapment and absolving himself of any guilt in this matter? If he had, it's doubtful he would've been fined and sentenced to jail time and community service, ergo, I'd say he did not.
So he did something wrong, he did so knowingly, even if he had "surrendered his sense of self" to the institution, he is still guilty of wrongdoing that destroyed another mans life - by the very same argument that the entrapped would have to prove that the entrapment led him to behave this way.
What's the difference?
Someone caught by an undercover cop is interacting with that cop for the first time. For this reason, by default, the cop is not assumed to have culpability.
He pleaded guilty, so it presumably wasn't an option. I doubt he had much contact with his son whilst under arrest on suspicion of murder so probably didn't know what his son had seen when making the plea, and three year old's memories fade pretty quickly (the son apparently had no recollection of the incident whatsoever later in life and grew up believing the father was guilty and not having the slightest interest in the appeal process). Even if the son had been able to testify at the time I suspect most judges would advise the jury not to take a denial that Daddy was there from an infant at face value.
Here's the reported confused remarks made by the three-year old: enough to change a wrongly accused man's mind about how to plead perhaps, but far from admissible testimony http://www.texastribune.org/2012/07/08/son-seeks-answers-his...
* a strange van lurking in the neighborhood
* the wife's credit card turning up in a different city after the events
* dna evidence from semen in the bed
* dna evidence from a bloody bandana
(both things with dna point to the same person who wasn't morton)
And from the article you linked:
The investigator also received evidence that the attack was committed by a third party intruder -- a neighbor reported that she observed what appeared to be someone staking out the house and someone attempted to use the victim’s credit card in San Antonio. - See more at: http://www.innocenceproject.org/news-events-exonerations/pre...
That Anderson had all of that is enough to point to a reasonably strong suspicion of knowning, if not stricly knowing of Morton's innocence.
Also note that the investigation and trial were in 1986-87. The first use of DNA testing in a criminal was in 1987, and testing would not be routine until many years later.
The semen in the bed could instead actually have been a core part of the prosecution's crime of passion narrative if it had gone to trial: woman is killed in her own bed in act of brutal sexual violence a day after husband leaves her a note complaining about her unwillingness to have intercourse with him. Reports of unrecognised vans being parked in residential streets might be a police lead but are certainly not exculpatory evidence, and the credit card claims were apparently inaccurate (the police had her not-stolen credit card in their possession)[1].
Overall Anderson's actions are pretty consistent with someone certain he'd got the right man and willing to breach regulations to avoid him taking it to trial and getting off on the basis the evidence against him was as circumstantial as it was compelling. Misconduct which undoubtedly influenced Morton's plea, but it's still likely the judge would (reasonably) have ruled hearsay attributed to the accused's three year old son inadmissible and green vans irrelevant, leaving him highly likely to be convicted unless his defence team were able to successfully lobby for newfangled DNA fingerprinting techniques to be explored. There was, after all, a clear imputed motive consistent with the evidence, no sign of any break-in and no alternative suspects. Even conviction at trial might still have significantly improved Morton's chances of getting the bandana DNA raised at a much earlier appeal but one can't fix the failings of America's judicial system by levying probably unwarranted accusations of malice at one rule-bending prosecutor.
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/ken-anderson-releas...
(The original post is from 2013)
/s (but only slightly)
So many cases are pled out these days (98% at the federal level), I doubt more than a tiny percentage of defendants are spending anything like $100k.
In addition, prosecutors are presumably held to a higher standard than defense lawyers, since they are state employees and are bound to act in the public interest.
We defer to the process for a reason. And human nature being what it is, that process is built on a presumption of innocence.
The men exonerated by the Innocence Project (99% proven wrongfully convicted are men) serve an average of thirteen years before exoneration, sometimes years after the exoneration happens.
The documentary shows prosecutors keeping people in prison, and therefore guilty people free, with impunity.
The Innocence Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project
I've always thought that a probabilistic justice system of sorts would be interesting. Something along the lines of "the default punishment for this is 10 years however we are only 60% certain about the conviction thus the verdict is X years (maybe something logarithmic, certainly not 6 years)"
Your first idea would have a problem in that people who's job is to convict people will accumulate that risk the longer they work. By chance, they're bound to get it wrong from time to time so it would unfairly punish those with the longest careers.
This, right here, is the heart of the matter for me. If we have people whose job is to convict people then they'll do whatever it takes, not necessarily serve justice or do the right thing, to convict anyone coming their way.
However, if you change the job goal to "reduce crime rate", or some such metric, then they would at least try to do what's fair.
This is not true at all, at least in the US. One of the core differences between criminal and civil cases is the burden of proof; the former requires proof "beyond a reasonable doubt", while for the latter it is "the preponderance of the evidence" or "clear and convincing" depending on the case. The definitions of these terms are not laser precise (I'm not sure how they could be), but there is at least a recognized role that the non-binary degree to which the evidence is convincing plays.
Yes, this means we sometimes let some truly despicable people walk away without being punished. That's the point.
While the devil is in the details, "reasonable" is a decent bar. We don't have to entertain every possibility. If your defense is that space-aliens made you do it, nobody is going to find that "reasonable". On the other hand, if you defense is at least a plausible alternative interpretation of the facts, I would consider that a "reasonable doubt".
As we will always have a margin of error in complex human interactions, we have to decide if we want to err on the side of vengeance even when it affects innocent people, or if we want to protect the innocent even when it also involves giving protection to the guilty. It is at these boundary cases where concepts like "freedom" is tested. If we only give the protections of a "free" society to the people that don't need it while ignoring rights and due process when it is convenient (trials are expensive), then any claim about being a civilized are merely dishonest marketing.
This forces judges to have an attitude along the lines of first offence -> warning plus fine if more than 1 week jail time, second offence -> same, but rescind driver license for a time as well, offence during driver license rescinded -> jail time. It is simply not possible to consider subtlety like ... oh, say, the actual case the government has under those rules.
But of course, because the government has been so successful in reducing time spent per case, at this point, giving judges an hour per case minimum would involve increasing the size of the justice system tenfold, maybe more.
Not if I'm on the jury.
But, IANAL, just find for the defendant and, thus, essentially dismiss the case.
Prosecutors should not be punished for (1) but should be punished for (2), in proportion to the seriousness of their misdeed and the sentence handed down (or served if they own up before the prisoner is released).
Prosecutors should be fully liable for illegal actions they take even when they're performing official duties. This guy should be serving a sentence years long, not days.
This is where every system that polices others plus themselves falls down. You can think of qualified immunity as professional courtesy between lawyers.
In Wisconsin the Republican legislature and Republican governor (the recently failed presidential candidate Walker) passed and signed a law limiting political corruption investigations, because they were annoyed at all the investigations and convictions of themselves.
No one watches the watchers.
First problem: making sure prosecutors are held personally liable for the X% of convictions that are wrongful and arise from prosecutorial misconduct.
Second problem: ensuring that people are freed for the Y% of convictions that are wrongful and don't result from misconduct.
Third problem: ensuring that the system can function to uphold the (100 - Y - X)% of convictions that are not wrongful.
The fact of the matter is that Y is a small number. And X is a much smaller number than that. Yet, the (100 - Y - X)% of convicts who are really guilty have no less incentive to appeal or sue for misconduct than the X% of people who have a valid case. Consequently, the justice system is awash in frivolous appeals and habeas petitions.
If it was just an issue of holding prosecutors liable in X% of cases, then this would be a much easier problem. But you have to do that without giving the (100 - Y - X)% of the justly-convicted a powerful tool to harass and abuse prosecutors who engaged in no wrongdoing. That makes the problem much harder.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/28/death-penalty-s...
If only there was something the justice system could do to reduce the number of people going into this pipeline!
Well, I'll let you go, Justice System -- I see you found a dude with a few grams of acid paper, which I think we can all agree makes him basically El Chapo.
And reducing the number of cases would not change the calculus. If you had fewer convicts you'd need fewer prosecutors, but the ratios for each prosecutor would not change. The basic problem is that if you make it easier for 1 person to hold the prosecutor accountable for actual misconduct, you make it easier for 20-30 validly convicted people to harass prosecutors who did nothing wrong.
Because the number of prosecutors isn't the limiting factor in whether or not we can safely do a better job of punishing bad prosecutors!
As you yourself stated, it's the legal apparatus of the justice system. Punishing bad prosecutors without allowing abuse and harassment would take a lot of resources, yes?
I was just pointing out that, with a smaller prison population, it wouldn't be necessary to turn judges out into the streets. Freed-up legal resources could be used to thoughtfully tackle the very real problems in the justice system.
You'd be subjecting individual prosecutors to a deluge of frivolous lawsuits, each carrying the risk of criminal prosecution. The issue isn't whether the system has the capacity to process those lawsuits, it's whether prosecutors could still do their jobs while dealing with them.
That's your invention, so feel free to knock it down.
I'm simply observing a truth, and was in the original comment: the enormous legal resources being wasted dealing with unnecessarily incarcerated people would be useful in dealing with prosecutorial misconduct.
I won't claim it's a profound or useful insight. :)
And the justice system could stand to spend more on limiting the amount of injustice it causes, an amount which the general population is starting to realize is not trivial.
(Also, I notice that you've amended your original comment to be a bit more sympathetic).
This isn't a case where a man is desperate for money or undereducated or is in a fit of rage or has a mental condition. This prosecutor has years of professional training which includes ethics courses. He knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted the conviction to appear tough, and damn the consequences.
I'd throw him in solitary for a year and never allow him access to a clock or calendar.
"What's newsworthy and novel about today's plea is that a prosecutor was actually punished in a meaningful way for his transgressions."
I'm sure we'd all like to be so 'meaningfully' punished for serious crimes. It's better than nothing - which seems to be the usual state of affairs - but it's clearly one law for the rich and one law for the poor.
500 hours of community service. In the US what does that mean, 3 months of picking litter by the road in an orange jumpsuit? Or does it mean that he can work for the prosecutors office for free for that time (obviously, he has a lot of experience there)
He also lost his law licence. What does that mean, how old was the guy? I don't know how it works in the US but if it effectively means forced retirement then he will be on a reduced pension, and moreover can't go for any cushy positions normally available for a retired prosecutor.
This also showed that judges ought to be asking this question of prosecutors.. I wonder if the defence can ask this question in the court and ask for similar sanctions if it were proved later that the prosecutor knew something they didn't disclose.
I wonder what has he been doing in the two years since this article was written?
Anyway 10 days is obviously nothing, especially when he's cost a man 25 years, but at least it's an attempt to hold someone responsible for a despicable act.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/292/t...
The depressing bit about the system is even when it's clear there's been a potential miscarriage of justice, and some poor sod has spent years behind bars on very shaky grounds, the system still tries its best to keep them there without retrial.
It's insane.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/471/t...
disgusting.
Taking 25 years from this innocent man is just the tip of the iceberg. He also took 25 years from his relatives. And this is probably not an isolated incident for him.
I think that the primary goal of court scentences should not be revenge, but "justice". Whatever that means. The possibility of punishment should be there to deter people from committing crimes. And they should be there so that after a crime, society can say: "See, we are serious about this. We do not want people to do those things".
So, the "revenge" thinking (with the extreme of "Take one life, and we'll kill you") does not seem right to me. Also, AFAIK, it was not designed into our juridical system - Which was designed to get past the "eye for an eye" system that was there before.
I also think that the primary goal of our prisons should be to re-integrate people into society, not punish them, but this is a completely different topic...
Edit: Clarified "The possibility of punishment should be there to deter"
How many prosecutors would hide evidence if they had even a 10% chance of getting caught, going to jail for 10 days and loose their career, like it happened in this case? That's what's important in my opinion.
Punishing people for the hypothetical future crimes of others! Is that "Justice".
Situation one: A kills B, B's brother kills A, A's brother kills B's brother... and eventually A's family and friends and B's family and friends are just killing other all the time.
Situation two: A kills B, the state kills A. Done. B's family has nobody left to kill, and A's family isn't likely to try to fight the state.
This suggests that the state can't make punishments too lenient, or people will take matters into their own hands again. It's not stable.
But certainly, if Michael Morton was never wrongfully convicted, that DNA would have been matched to the Morton murder and this would have been solved decades ago.
[0] http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/mark-alan-norwood-found...
That prosecutor murdered 25 years of a man's life.
If murder deserves life in prison, then murdering 25 years of a man's life deserves 25 years of prison.
That said, I'm not saying that this behaviour should not go unpunished, an attorney should be disbarred for this type of behaviour, and serve jail time for a felony (i.e. 1-5 years in State prison) . I think the State and the taxpayers should be made to pay the tab like a previous poster said because in my opinion, they are just as guilty as the prosecutor for setting up the environment in which this was allowed to happen.
That's an interesting situation. If a lot of prosecutors quit, then there's less bandwidth to prosecute, resulting in less demand for (I presume) defense lawyers.
You present that almost like it would be a bad thing.
Americans are bloodthirsty: lock 'em up and throw away the key. When the elected district attorneys have pictures of handcuffs and leg irons on their election posters, what does that tell you? (Said election poster seen in Fresno County, California).
The state should be required. It can optionally pursue compensation from the lawyer/judge.
I totally agree that the primary goal of prison should be to re-integrate people into society, but one of the prerequisites for that is that the prisoner understands that what they did was wrong and why it's wrong.
And you are correct, the American electorate wants blood and says "Lock 'em up and weld the door shut" when it comes to electing a District Attorney.
Also, I'd be shocked if this didn't open Anderson up to civil liability. That's where Morton can seek damages; not in criminal court.
Interesting Anderson took a large part of Morton's life. Maybe justice would be served if Morton took a large part of Anderson's money... Something feels uncomfortable about this but I can't quite place it.
What about if the penalty was in some way proportional to the wealth/income of the perpetrator?
FWIW: It doesn't. Prosecutors generally have absolute (not qualified) immunity.
See Connick v. Thompson, 563 US 51 (2011) (https://www.oyez.org/cases/2010/09-571)
Here's another for you: In Imbler v. Pachtman, 424 U. S. 409 (1976), the Court held that prosecutors performing core prosecutorial functions are entitled to absolute immunity.
In this case, it was a core advocative function that was performed. It does not matter if they do it in bad faith, illegally, whatever. They will be given absolute immunity.
The only cases you will find otherwise will be around non-core functions, or about the specific act of things like "being bribed around filing criminal charges", and not things part of the core function.
You don't have to take my word for it, of course. Look at the decisions of literally every circuit. Or any of the myriad of law review papers detailing the history, etc.
The biggest impact has been on legal discovery. Often the evidence one side or another needs is buried in massive quantities of documents, e.g. corporate memos. It used to involve people manually going through every document. Now computers can build a search engine just for that case, based on the documents either being originally electronic, or scanned. So it's easier to find the evidence you need to either prosecute or exonerate.
There have been attempts at legal 'expert systems'. Expert systems were an offshoot of early AI where people were put through computerised interviews that tried to automate otherwise skilled investigative procedures. I have not heard of legal expert systems being in use anywhere, but I am not in the legal industry so if they were, I wouldn't know about them. I suspect they're easier to apply to things like routine property law than complex criminal cases.
There's also the Hammurabi project. That is very interesting, though again, not relevant here. It tries to encode law in a custom programming language to automatically build expert systems based on it. It's more useful for things like navigating the absurdly complicated US tax code than criminal defence (of course the two may sometimes overlap).
If not, then this is a really fucked-up system.
Also, part of having a healthy justice system is having the ability to sue for literally any, or no reason. In an ideal world a flagrant lawsuit would just get thrown out without any harm to either party. Unfortunately we've built a system where a suit can bankrupt either party, so it turns into a war of attrition.
In any case, I really hope Michael Morton finds some real justice and Ken Anderson doesn't get off the hook that easily.
What happened make me feel very angry. Not that long since I read about this terrible injustice as well:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/11/glenn-ford-black-ma...
However it does not say what the update was.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150522105521/http://www.huffin...
The convicted man's guilt or innocence should not matter at all when judging the conduct of the prosecutor.
Edit: You can check for yourself. https://web.archive.org/web/20150522105521/http://www.huffin...
The article wasn't updated. The only addition is that "Prison Tattoos" thing at the bottom.
Also, now that the the accused in the case has been declared not guilty, will there be an investigation into who actually committed the murder?
Let black Police deal with black Culprits;
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...
I didn't understand the title because only a Judge and/or Jury can convict people.