Prosecutorial Misconduct: More common than some think

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that "Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, speaking in a slow and deliberate manner that failed to conceal his anger, said that in 25 years on the bench, he had 'never seen mishandling and misconduct like what I have seen' by the Justice Department prosecutors who tried the Stevens case."

It's good to see that Judge Sullivan has opened his eyes to the issue of government misconduct. If he looks around more, he'll see more. Certainly, the consequences for many have been far worse than what Ted Stevens has suffered. Consider a couple cases from the Innocence Project:

In the case of Curtis McCarty in Oklahoma, prosecutors intentionally misled jurors and relied on falsified forensic evidence to convict an innocent man of murder, leading to a death sentence. McCarty was exonerated in 2007 after serving 21 years in prison – including 19 on death row.

Prosecutors also committed misconduct in the case of Bruce Godschalk, who spent more than 14 years in Pennsylvania prison for a rape he didn’t commit. When the Innocence Project requested DNA testing after Godschalk had served 13 years in prison, prosecutors said they had secretly sent the evidence for testing and received an inconclusive result. Additionally, they said the tests had destroyed the evidence. A missing piece of evidence would then later mysteriously surface, and DNA testing freed Godschalk.

These are not isolated examples. In 2007, Holyoke Professor Richard Moran wrote in an op-ed column for the New York Times that "My recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel."

I hope now that Judge Sullivan has seen misconduct in the prosecution of a wealthy, powerful, and celebrated US Senator, he--and others--will keep their eyes open and see what has been happening to many whose tragedies far exceed what Ted Stevens has suffered.