by Jamie Rider

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

It is endemic throughout our culture: that image of the Law and Order episode where a fair and conscientious prosecutor is struggling against the nit-picking defense attorney to send the guilty to jail instead of back to the streets. From our Constitution to the local Kansas laws, the social contract we have states that all people are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The sad fact is that too often the scales of justice can be unbalanced by prosecutorial misconduct. This happens at all levels: from the trial in Federal Courts of Senator Ted Stevens to the recent Kansas City, Kansas case of Mathew Daniels, a man convicted of abandoning a body, due in large part to hundreds of pages of investigative material withheld from the defense and the jury.

In the case of Senator Ted Edwards, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia fount in United States of America vs. Theodore F. Stevens, No.08-cr-231 (EGS) that the prosecution chose to ignore the court's order to provide all communications from anyone in OPI to any other office within the Department of Justice. Instead of appropriate compliance, the prosecution provided only limited documents to the court and no copies of any documents to the defense. In that instance, Judge Black of the U.S. District Court refused to accept the claims by the prosecutor that this was a harmless error. Without proper notification, it was impossible for the defense to properly prepare for the arguments in court, putting the prosecutor in a stronger position to push for conviction without any concern for the rights of thedefendant. In this instance, the defendant's counsel appropriate sought redress by filing a motion to dismiss the proceedings entirely due to this flagrant misconduct on the part of the prosecutor. Whether it was hunger for headlines or the notoriety of "bagging" a United States Senator, in this instance the prosecutor flaunted both court direction and the requirements of evidence protocols.

While the prosecutor in this case claimed it was strictly "aboveboard", when the conviction becomes more important than the facts in a case, it is necessary to hold prosecutors accountable for their behavior. In this case, the defendant Mathew Daniels was sentenced to 22 years in prison. As a result of the evidence the prosecution withheld, this 2005 conviction was thrown out in February, 2009. This is just one of many cases recently tried in the Jackson County courts that have been overturned

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