Day in and day out, juries are assembled, witnesses summoned, and evidence presented and challenged - all in the hope that a just verdict will be reached at the end of it all. By and large, the criminal justice works the way it is intended: the innocent are freed, the guilty are not and the scales of justice are in balance. That is, except when it doesn’t.

 

There are many ways that justice can be skewed, but perhaps the most reprehensible is when a prosecutor subverts justice to achieve a conviction. Unfortunately, this happens too often. Three quarters of a century ago, the United State Supreme Court overturned a conviction because of prosecutorial misconduct, stating then that the prosecutor’s interest in “a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” Alarmingly, there are far too many examples of how prosecutors can pervert justice, justifying the means for the ends.

 

In a landmark examination of prosecutorial misconduct in California between 1997 and 2009 by the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University of Law, found a deeply flawed criminal justice system by prosecutors willing to:

*withhold exculpatory evidence

*intimidate a witness

*violate fifth amendment rights to remain silent

*present false evidence

*improperly cross-examine 

*use an improper argument

 

The study of prosecutorial misconduct, pioneered by Kathleen M. Ridolfi and Maurice Possley, reviewed more than 4,000 state and federal appellate rulings in California filed between 1997 and 2009 and of those, the investigators found 707 cases in which courts explicitly found misconduct on the part of prosecutors and another 282 cases in which there was misconduct, but the courts found that the trials were fair, in any case. Incredibly, of the 4,741 cases, only six prosecutors were publicly disciplined for their conduct in pursuing a criminal case.