WSJ has an interesting article about USA Today’s series on prosecutorial misconduct.
The [sic] USA Today identified 200 cases since 1997 in which prosecutors supposedly violated laws or ethics rules; in at least 48 of the cases, defendants were convicted of crimes, but courts gave them shorter sentences than they would have otherwise received due to prosecutorial misconduct.
Some of the defendants who got shorter sentences, according to USA Today, returned to crime almost as soon as they went free.
In many instances prosecutors themselves agree to sweetheart plea deals with defendants after findings of misconduct, according to USA Today. In D.C. alone, for example, the Department of Justice agreed to shorter prison sentences for at least 8 convicted murderers after judges and defense attorneys discovered that prosecutors had concealed potentially exculpatory evidence.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. told the USA Today that 7 of the 8 murderers were prosecuted “by a single lawyer who left the office more than 15 years ago, hardly a systemic problem.”
A Justice Department spokeswoman said the USA Today’s investigation “misleads readers by providing a statistically inaccurate representation of the hard work done by federal prosecutors.”
Ah, the old “it’s rare so it is not a problem” excuse. I believe Blackstone had a good answer for that: it is better for ten guilty men to go to free than to force one innocent man to submit to punishment by the state. Every single victim of prosecutorial abuse matters. It is worse than child abuse, worse even than homicide, worse than terrorism for the simple reason that there is no recourse for the victim when he is victimized. There is no greater authority he can appeal to. And in most cases, as the USA Today article points out, and I’ve pointed out many times, cases of prosecutorial misconduct are rarely punished, regardless of how egregious the DOJ’s actions.
In the Enron case, the lawyers were completely lawless. Laws were ignored or applied incorrectly; see the NatWest Three and my articles about extradition, or Jeff Skilling’s prosecution under “Honest Services and see also Kevin Howard for a hair-raising experience with honest services, and the Nigerian Barge defendants and Ken Rice and the various threats they used on him, and Jeff McMahon and Joe Hirko and Rex Shelby and Rick Causey and please, look at what they did to Lea Fastow. They used her to get her husband though her crime would never have been prosecuted if she wasn’t “Lea Fastow” — according to John Kroger, a federal prosecutor! They took a mother away from her two terrified young children and put her in prison for a year for a crime they ordinarily wouldn’t even prosecute.
Here are twenty-four explicit, specific examples of prosecutorial misconduct.
So don’t tell me it only happens once in a great while. It happens all the time if you’re an Enron defendant.
It is systemic and that is what this Blog shows, HoustonCleartThinkers shows and what http://www.ungagged.net shows. Keep up the good work. I am glad USA Today is making it clear. They have a bigger audience. People do not believe it and do not want to believe it. It is scary and sad that our system is that corrupt.