Any prosecutor who uses the term "unindicted co-ejaculator" with a straight face should be summarily fired.
This kind of thing and what you see in St. Louis this week is a good reminder that without constant effort, the police and the court system will become just another faction with no more concern over justice than any of the people they arrest. Trump's real damage is going to happen through the courts, so I expect this will get worse.
Also, waiting until the day of the new trial to say you decline to prosecute in hopes that the guy waiting in prison will crack is quite literally evil.
Thank you for posting this. Incredibly depressing, but important.
Also, 2 gets it exactly right.
I should be commenting on this, but it's just so grim. But a good thing to post.
You could sort of tell just from watching Homicide that the real life models did shit like this. And also from knowing something about the justice system, but still.
I think this is different from the usual plea bargain case. The bar to get a new trial after already being convicted is very high.
The bar to get a new trial after already being convicted is very high.
So is the bar of basic human decency. Don't prosecutors get, I don't know, ethics training or something?
There's nothing inherently unethical about retrying somebody if you think they did it. That's just not compatible with offering somebody a plea of admit your guilt and walk free or face a new trial and then dropping the new trial after holding them in prison as long as you could without that new trial.
I thought "Alford plea" must have been named after the defendant in some century-old case, like Daniel M'Naghten or Anne Nolo Contendere. It turns out it's very recent.
just shameful and revolting. I almost don't understand how the prosecutors can regard this as enough of a "win" to be worth preserving
7: if so it doesn't seem to stick.
7, 11: Ethics for lawyers is weird. That is, there's a technical code of what's 'ethical' that's a very big professional deal, and while it's not a terrible code, it doesn't track terribly tightly to 'being a decent, moral person,' and there are elements of it that push in the opposite direction. You've got an ethical responsibility to represent your client zealously within the limits of ethical behavior otherwise, and you can read that as encouragement not to get squeamish about immoral behavior that's not 'ethically' forbidden, if it's in your client's best interests.
Not so much what I'm doing right now, but what I was doing for the eight years before this, I had to consciously remember that the state I work for didn't have an interest in winning cases, it had an interest in carrying out the laws as they were intended -- I'd find myself (occasionally. This was something that might happen every fifteen or twenty cases, not more than that) defending cases against self-represented or incompetently represented citizens who were actually right -- the state had done something wrong to them. And I would do my utmost (usually successful) to get the state to settle those even though they were winnable in court, because our interest as the state wasn't in winning cases, it was in making sure the right thing happened.
But... that's a conceptual leap, that it sounds like a lot of prosecutors don't make. They're stuck on zealous representation of their client meaning that they have an obligation to do everything within the limits of their 'ethical' code to get the conviction.
12: Also, I suspect, you got your job in a normal way. If you'd been elected, and you knew that your re-election depended on high conviction rates regardless of whether justice obtained, your incentive surface would have been tilted in a different direction.
But we're talking about a twenty year old case here (twenty years in which an innocent person was in prison). You can almost certainly just blame the last guy.
Well, I got my job through blogging connections. (Thanks, Scott Lemeui/x and Seth Far/ber!) So not exactly normal, but your point stands.
Although... would voters really respond badly to something presented as 'correcting an injustice'? Letting an innocent man out of jail shouldn't offend law and order types.
People also don't like acknowledging that the justice system gets it wrong sometimes. In IL's runup to the death penalty moratorium in the late 90s or early 00s, a lot of people were very invested in the idea that there just weren't innocent people sentenced to death.
would voters really respond badly to something presented as 'correcting an injustice'? Letting an innocent man out of jail shouldn't offend law and order types.
Even if that were so - and Moby's point is a good one - that isn't what you'd be doing. Maybe (maybe) if you were reversing unjust convictions, that might be seen as a good thing. But refusing to prosecute suspects because you don't think the case is reliable would come across very differently.
But that's exactly why they did anyway.
Many many years ago,* I was watching some PBS show where Justice Scalia was a panelist, and to the question about executing an innocent man, he quipped that the man was probably guilty of some other crime, so it was more or less ok. General laughter ensued.
These people are individuals with agency, sure. They're also stand-ins, each of them, for millions, if not tens of millions of people.
*I may even have been when I was in law school, back when he was fairly new, and had a reputation -- which I've never understood -- as some kind of intellectually honest explicator of the law.
I've said this before, but I thought he was a better than average judge on cases where he didn't have a political motivation to cheat. He was a good clear logical thinker and writer, and where he didn't have a corrupt motivation to be a lying piece of trash, I think he mostly got things right. On the SC, of course, the lying piece of trash facet of his professional identity spent an awful lot of time in evidence.
22 We're just going to have to agree to disagree on that first sentence. And the second sentence.
To put it differently, I'd say he was wrong from the get-go, and when he ended up at the right result, that was happy coincidence. By get-go, I mean that the words of a statute are never holy writ, but always an approximation of an intention to create a fair and just result in a given situation. Lose sight of the entire purpose of the enterprise -- fairness and justice -- and you've got no business at all serving as a judge.
I never thought he was on board with the reason we have law.