HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
AP PHOTO/PAUL SANCYA
THE UNTOUCHABLES
since 1970. Among those, the center
found a little over 2,012 instances
in which an appeals court found the
misconduct material to the conviction and overturned it. Less than
50 cases resulted in any professional sanction for the prosecutor.
In 2010, USA Today published
a six-month investigation of 201
cases involving misconduct by federal prosecutors. Of those, only
one prosecutor “was barred even
temporarily from practicing law for
misconduct.” The Justice Department wouldn’t even tell the paper
which case it was, citing concern
for the prosecutor’s privacy.
A 2006 review in the Yale Law
Journal concluded that “[a] prosecutor’s violation of the obligation
to disclose favorable evidence accounts for more miscarriages of
justice than any other type of malpractice, but is rarely sanctioned
by courts, and almost never by
disciplinary bodies.”
An Innocence Project study of
75 DNA exonerations — that is,
cases where the defendant was
later found to be unquestionably
innocent — found that prosecutorial misconduct factored into just
under half of those wrongful convictions. According to a spokesman
for the organization, none of the
prosecutors in those cases faced
any serious professional sanction.
A 2009 study by the Northern California Innocence Project
found 707 cases in which appeals
courts had found prosecutor misconduct in the state between 1997
and 2009. But of the 4,741 attorneys the state bar disciplined over
that period, just 10 were prosecutors. The study also found 67
prosecutors whom appeals courts
had cited for multiple infractions.
Only six were ever disciplined.
Most recently, in April, ProPublica published an investigation
of 30 cases in New York City in
which prosecutor misconduct had
Richard
Convertino
was
acquitted
of federal
charges
accusing
him of
withholding
exculpatory
evidence in a
high-profile
terror case in
2007.