Television may conjure a “gladiatorial” image of the justice system — “two fevered champions of the truth as they see it ... going into battle,” says Marquis, the National District Attorneys Association official. The reality, he says, is less noble.
“I’ve been a defense lawyer,” says Marquis, a prosecutor in Astoria, Ore. “Your job is to protect the guilty. ... Vigorous defense of a defendant is never sanctioned. Overly vigorous prosecution is.”
Until a recent state Supreme Court decision limiting their power to control the court calendar, North Carolina prosecutors were considered among the most powerful in the nation. Even with the change, district attorneys retain broad discretion.
“The prosecutor is the de facto law after an arrest, deciding whether to charge the suspect with committing a crime, what charge to file from a range of possibilities, whether to offer a pretrial deal, and, if so, the terms of the deal,” wrote the authors of “Harmful Error,” a 2003 study on prosecutorial misconduct by the Center for Public Integrity.
Researchers found more than 2,000 cases from the previous three decades in which judges and appellate court panels cited prosecutorial misconduct as a factor when dismissing charges, reversing convictions or reducing sentences.
They found thousands more cases in which judges labeled prosecutorial behavior inappropriate but “harmless,” and upheld convictions.
Of the 44 cases the center found in which prosecutors were brought up on disciplinary charges, 12 had their licenses suspended and two were disbarred.
Going after a law license is the only way to punish prosecutors’ harmful missteps, says Warden of Northwestern’s wrongful-convictions center.
“Our law makes prosecutors immune from civil liability in these cases,” he says. “So no matter how egregious their misconduct, basically they can’t be sued. And so there’s no price to pay.”
Hatcher’s case was dismissed, but not without a price, he says. A former assistant DA in Cabell County, W.Va., Hatcher was accused of failing to disclose exculpatory evidence in a kidnapping and sexual assault case — specifically, that the accusers had been hypnotized. Although a disciplinary board dismissed the charges for lack of evidence, Hatcher says defending himself “cost me as much as I’d made” in 20 years as a prosecutor.
Insisting that true prosecutorial misconduct is rare, Marquis argues the prosecutor is the only member of the legal profession whose “sole allegiance is to the truth” — even if it means “torpedoing” his own case.
“One of the luxuries of being a prosecutor is the ability to look at a case at any stage of the proceedings and say, ‘You know what? Ixnay.”’
- Discuss Story On Newsvine
-
Rate Story:
LowHigh - Instant Message
MORE FROM OTHER SPORTS |
 Other sports Section Front |
| Add Other sports headlines to your news reader: |
Sponsored links