Law and the New Order: A Fresh Wave of District Attorneys is Redefining Justice
"Criminal justice is one of a small number of issues on which conservatives and liberals have begun to adopt overlapping policy positions, if for different reasons. Conservatives worry about the expense of mass imprisonment; liberals talk about the social costs of hollowing out communities through incarceration. But they are coming together. Following a period in which longer and longer sentences were meted out for increasing numbers of crimes, resulting in huge increases in corrections spending, most states have been rethinking their approach. More than 30 have approved laws that seek to reduce prison populations, while increasing funds for treatment or re-entry programs that can cut down on recidivism. The results have been encouraging, with crime rates remaining low in most jurisdictions even as the number of prisoners drops."

Rampant Prosecutorial Misconduct

In the justice system, prosecutors have the power to decide what criminal charges to bring, and since 97 percent of cases are resolved without a trial, those decisions are almost always the most important factor in the outcome. That is why it is so important for prosecutors to play fair, not just to win. This obligation is embodied in the Supreme Court’s 1963 holding in Brady v. Maryland, which required prosecutors to provide the defense with any exculpatory evidence that could materially affect a verdict or sentence.

Yet far too often, state and federal prosecutors fail to fulfill that constitutional duty, and far too rarely do courts hold them accountable. Last month, Alex Kozinski, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, issued the most stinging indictment of this systemic failure in recent memory. “There is an epidemic of Brady violations abroad in the land,” Judge Kozinski wrote in dissent from a ruling against a man who argued that prosecutors had withheld crucial evidence in his case. “Only judges can put a stop to it.” 

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How Prosecutor Win Rates And Informants Drive Wrongful Murder Convictions

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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