by Jean C. Fisher

Created on: May 11, 2009   Last Updated: June 16, 2009

Recent Decisions Expose Flaws in Prosecutorial System

Recent Missouri Appeals Court reversals, rulings by a local Circuit Court Judge charging Jackson County prosecutors with so-called Brady violations [Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963)] and the well-publicized dismissal of seven counts of corruption against Alaska Senator Ted Stevens by a U.S. District Court Judge on similar grounds have put the methods of prosecutors' offices throughout the U.S. under scutiny - triggering discussions regarding an apparent lack of prosecutorial oversight and leading some to question prosecutors' ethics.

In throwing out Matthew Davis' guilty plea to charges of abandoning the dead body of his girlfriend, Judge Edith Messina described the failure of Jackson County prosecutors to turn over hundreds of pages of potentially exculpatory evidence to Davis' defense team as having "deliberately and fraudulently misled the court and defense counsel".

This latest judicial chastisement represents the third such ruling directed at Jackson County prosecutors in as many years.

In another case, the Missouri Appeals Court ordered a former attorney convicted in the 2000 murder of his law partner released from custody until a new trial could be mounted due to prosecutors' failure to disclose a potentially exculpable surveillance video-tape and, in 2008, a federal jury awarded $16 million in damages after determining prosecutors knew that the wife of a man tried and acquitted three times for child-molesting and an investigator on the case were having an affair.

And it appears the Jackson County cases are not exceptional. In dismissing recent charges of corruption against Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan cited what he termed "a troubling tendency among prosecutors to stretch the boundaries of ethics restrictions and conceal evidence to win cases" before appointing a special investigator to see if six career prosecutors should face criminal charges for their failure to turn over evidence to Stevens' defense attorneys.

Some legal experts feel this type of unethical behavior by prosecutors is endemic to a system that, for the most part, fails to hold prosecutors who commit Brady-related transgressions accountable.

In a study by Chicago Tribune reporters Armstrong and Possley in 1999 of 381 cases where appellate courts eventually reversed homicide convictions based upon Brady violations or foreknowledge of witnesses' false testimony wherein prosecutors' actions

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