Tagged: exoneration

Former DA, now Sitting State Court Judge, Charged and Arrested for Past Brady Violations

In an unprecedented move against prosecutorial misconduct, former District Attorney Ken Anderson was arrested and released on $7500 based on charges that he violated state evidence tampering statutes and committed contempt of court when he violated a court order by suppressing powerful exculpatory evidence in the decades-old Michael Morton case. Morton was prosecuted for murder but was exonerated through DNA evidence after he served nearly 25 years in prison. District Judge Louis Surms, who is sitting as the court of inquiry into the Morton conviction, also issued an order to show cause requiring Anderson to appear on a criminal contempt citation.

Judge Sturms found that Anderson had concealed two critical pieces of evidence:  a police interview transcript that showed Morton’s young son had witnessed the murder and reported that his father had not been home at the time; and evidence that a man with a green van parked near the Morton home had been seen walking repeatedly into the woods behind the house.

Related Readings

Michael Morton Prosecutor Will Face Criminal Charges for Withholding Evidence by Innocence Project (Apr. 2013)

Pennsylvania and Colorado try to get compensation legislation passed

If you are wrongly convicted and later exonerated in New Jersey, you may be able to obtain $20,000 for each year of your wrongful incarceration. New Jersey has a special statute designed to indemnify wrongly convicted individuals. So does New York, where there is no limit on the damages that can be awarded by the Court of Claims. But if you were wrongly convicted right next door in Pennsylvania, you are not likely to recover a cent. Unless you can fashion a lawsuit from the events leading to your conviction (and that’s often difficult), there is no statute to provide monetary assistance.   All statutes should enact legislation to compensate the innocent and help them integrate into society.

We’ve compiled some links for those of you who are interested in reading more on this subject:

Common Factors of Wrongful Convictions … ?

Washington Institute for Public and International Affairs Research at American University has conducted a three-year study focusing on the identification of common factors in wrongful convictions. The results of the study have been published in a December 2012 summary titled Predicting Erroneous Convictions: A Social Science Approach to Miscarriages of Justice.

The study identifies forensic error, prosecutorial misconduct, false confessions, and eyewitness misidentification among the common factors in wrongful convictions. The study suggests there is a notable difference between “causes” of erroneous convictions compared to “correlates” of wrongful convictions.

Missing so far in the literature is a study that asks how the criminal justice system identifies innocent defendants in order to prevent erroneous convictions. What we want to know – and thus what dictated our research strategy – is what factors are uniquely present in cases that lead the system to rightfully acquit or dismiss charges against the innocent defendant (so-called “near misses”), which are not present in cases that lead the system to erroneously convict the innocent.

The study identifies factors aiding to erroneous conviction of innocent defendants including:

  • Age and criminal history of the defendant
  • Punitiveness of the state
  • Brady violations
  • Forensic error
  • Weak defense and prosecution case
  • Family defense witness
  • Inadvertent misidentification
  • Laying by a non-eyewitness
  • False confessions
  • Criminal justice official error
  • Race effects
  • Tunnel vision

The study concludes that

increased attention to the failing dynamics of the criminal justice system, rather than simply isolated errors or causes, may lead to better prevention of erroneous convictions. …[The] results suggest that there should be greater emphasis at all levels and on all sides of the criminal justice system, including police, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges, to analyze and learn from past mistakes before they result in serious miscarriages of justice.

When I read “common factors” in wrongful convictions, I had to pause. Is the criminal justice system so flawed that there is a sufficient amount of wrongful convictions to conduct a study? Apparently so; an alarming number of wrongful convictions have emerged in the past decade(s) and the number keeps growing. The Innocence Project has been one of the leaders in the efforts to exonerate wrongfully convicted, currently showing 303 successfully exonerated individuals. But is exoneration after the fact enough? The study offers a different approach to erroneous convictions – an approach consisting of variety of steps to be taken early on in an investigation that would prevent the commission of erroneous convictions rather than dealing with the effects of wrongful conviction when damage to the wrongly accused and everyone around her has already been done.

Related Readings

See additional articles relating to wrongful convictions.

Judicial Hearing on Prosecutorial Misconduct in Texas

A unique public inquiry into prosecutorial misconduct has just finished, with the court taking the case under advisement.  At issue is whether the prosecutor should be charged based on Brady violations during an exonerated defendant’s murder trial.

www.texastribune.org/tribpedia/michael-morton/