American Justice

I watched a national news program recently that dealt with a man who had been tried and convicted of murdering his wife. He was sentenced to life in prison despite no evidence or witness testimony tying him to his wife's death. Seven years ago his defense team realized that a critical piece of evidence in the possession of the country sheriff contained stains that could be tested for DNA. They were confident the analysis would demonstrate their client’s innocence.

The county prosecutor fought the testing from 2005 to 2010, repeatedly and publicly disparaging the tests as “irrelevant”, “silly”, and “grasping at straws”. The only reason he finally released the evidence to a lab was because he was ordered to do so by the state Court of Appeals. The DNA tests found the blood of the dead woman as well as that of a man whose DNA matched that of a convicted offender in a national DNA database who was not then incarcerated and whose DNA was found on the body of another woman murdered two years after the first victim. By the time of his release from prison by court order, the wrongly convicted husband had served 25 years.

Most people realize that the American system of justice is imperfect. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, police detectives, judges, and jurors are human and subject to err. We make mistakes, no doubt.

What concerns me is not only that an innocent man was convicted but that the prosecutor fought so hard to prevent potential evidence from being tested. The prosecutor who fought the DNA testing claims he did so with honest intentions. According to that prosecutor, his five-year, sustained opposition to DNA testing was done in good faith. Frankly, although I'm not a lawyer and know little about criminal law, that seems very, very hard to believe. In fact, I do not believe that claim.

My nephew is a microbiologist who for years was in charge of a major national lab division where dozens of DNA samples are analyzed every day of the year. At a qualified lab and in the hands of trained technicians, the procedure is complex but not extraordinarily difficult.

So, why did the prosecutor fight so hard to disallow DNA testing and as a direct result keep a wrongly convicted man in prison for another seven years? Exactly how was justice served by that opposition? I have no answers to those very disturbing questions.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled (Imbler v. Pachtman) that prosecutors have absolute immunity from civil lawsuits over how they mishandled criminal cases in court, no matter how critical, intentional, or obvious those abuses. That immunity applies even when prosecutors intentionally failed to disclose evidence that could have demonstrated someone's innocence or when they deliberately violated rules designed to ensure trials are fair to the accused.

Prosecutors at every level know they can commit misconduct with impunity since their powers are basically unchecked. And if readers think that prosecutors who engage in deliberate misconduct can be disbarred or prosecuted, a 2010 study by USA Today found that of 201 documented cases of federal prosecutor misconduct, no disbarments or convictions resulted. None.

So, the next time you read about a prosecutor claiming he acted in “good faith” my advice is to be more than a little skeptical.