HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
THE UNTOUCHABLES
effort to bully Swartz into pleading guilty rather than go to trial
and risk the possibility of a long
prison sentence.
When asked about the appropriateness of the charges in
the Swartz case, Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress he
thought they were “a good use of
prosecutorial discretion.”
Dalton is at the heart of a current effort by some in the state’s
defense bar to impose some accountability on prosecutors in the
wake of the Supreme Court decision in John Thompson’s case.
Now that the possibility of civil
liability has been all but removed,
there’s a new urgency to either
prod the state’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) to address
misconduct, or to expose its ineffectiveness if it doesn’t.
“The Brady problem really became atrocious under Connick,”
Dalton says of the former Orleans
district attorney. “Nondisclosure
was routine, and it’s ridiculous to
say he didn’t know about it. He
was too competent not to know
what was happening. And it has
gotten only marginally better
since.” (The district attorney’s office in Orleans Parish did not return requests for comment.)
In Louisiana, ethics complaints
against practicing attorneys are
first considered by the ODC. If
the office finds clear and convincing evidence of misconduct, it
forwards its findings to an independent hearing committee made
up of two lawyers and one nonlawyer, all of whom are volunteers. That committee must then
sign off on the misconduct finding
for the charge to go forward. Ultimately, the Louisiana Supreme
Court makes the final decision
on whether or not the charge has
merit, and if so, on how to discipline the offending lawyer.
Current ODC chief counsel
Charles Plattsmier admits there
are major obstacles preventing his
office from imposing any real accountability on wayward prosecutors. In his 17 years on the job, he
can only recall three occasions in
which a prosecutor has been disciplined for misconduct.
Plattsmier wouldn’t talk about
specific cases, but from public records, it’s clear one of those disciplinary actions came against
Roger Jordan, the prosecutor who
convicted Shareef Cousin. For suppressing evidence in that case, the
Louisiana Supreme Court in 2005
suspended Jordan from practicing law for three months, but then
suspended that penalty. As long as
Jordan isn’t found to have commit-