In the American criminal system, one primary purpose of
constitutional protections is to achieve justice by convicting the right
person for the right crime. But prosecutors whose bonuses, promotions,
and sometimes election are tied to conviction rates and prominent “wins”
have perverse incentives to instead score any conviction at all. Recent
reporting by investigative outlet ProPublica adds to the evidence that
this sort of prosecutor misconduct too often goes unpunished, meaning there is little risk in manipulating the evidence and great reward.
In more than two dozen instances in which judges overturned convictions in New York citing explicit attorney misconduct, disciplinary action was almost never taken
against these prosecutors, and only one prosecutor was disbarred,
suspended, or censured. ProPublica’s Joaquin Sapien traces the trail of
errors that plagued one such case
by Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione, whose murder
conviction who was overturned after Jabbar Collins spent 15 years in
prison. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office maintains Vecchione
engaged in no misconduct, but the reporting, a civil lawsuit, and a
criminal exoneration tell a different story. Vecchione, who refused to
be interviewed for the article, submitted a sworn affidavit attesting
that a former store clerk who worked nearby the scene of the murder had
fled to Puerto Rico because he had been threatened by people involved in
the case. Vecchione had never met or spoken to that former store clerk,
Adrian Diaz, and Diaz later said he had never been threatened. Even
more damning, Vecchione reportedly coerced the testimony of a witness
who admitted he was drug-dependent and lying when he identified the
perpetrator:
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