HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
AP FILE PHOTO/JUDI BOTTONI
THE UNTOUCHABLES
(The jury acquitted.) More recently, the 2006 Duke lacrosse case
resulted in criminal contempt
charges against Durham County
District Attorney Mike Nifong. He
was disbarred and sentenced to a
day in jail.
Former Williamson County,
Texas, District Attorney Ken Anderson currently faces felony
charges for failure to turn over
exculpatory evidence in the case
of Michael Morton, a man who
served 25 years in prison for his
wife’s murder until he was exonerated by DNA testing on evidence
Anderson allegedly had helped
cover up.
The charges against Nifong and
Anderson are newsworthy precise-
ly because they’re so uncommon.
“The situation in Texas is encouraging, but I can’t think of any other examples beyond that one and
the Duke case,” Benjamin says.
In 2008, Craig Watkins, the district attorney in Dallas County,
Texas, suggested that both criminal
charges and disbarment for willful
Brady violations should be more
common. The mere utterance of
such a thing from a sitting prosecutor was unexpected, even from
a DA like Watkins, a former defense attorney who has been widely
praised for his efforts to reform the
culture in the Dallas DA’s office.
The New York defense attorney and
popular law blogger Scott Greenfield called it “earth-shattering.”
Yet Watkins’s suggestion glosses over the fact any such charges
would need to be brought by an-
Thompson
spent 14 of
his 18 years
at Louisiana
State
Penitentiary
on death row
before the
U.S. Supreme
Court
dismissed his
case in 2011.