Tagged: prosecutorial discretion

International Legal Ethics Conference: Ethics in Criminal Advocacy

The seventh International Legal Ethics Conference took place last week at Fordham Law School’s Stein Center for Law and Ethics. The conference is supported by the International Association of Legal Ethics and was sponsored, in addition, by a variety of  law firms and law schools, including our own law school. We were proud to sponsor this provocative and informative conference.

One of the panels at the conference was devoted to current ethical issues in criminal advocacy from an international and comparative perspective. Panelists addressed a variety of fascinating issues arising in Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, Chile, Australia and the United States. The panel was moderated by Prof. Lissa Griffin, of the Elisabeth Haub School of Law. A summary of the presentations follows:


CURRENT ISSUES IN DEFENSE ETHICS 

Anat Horovitz, Hebrew University, Israel
Re-trials are the procedure prescribed under Israeli law through which a person who claims to have been wrongfully convicted can try to reverse his conviction. From a legal perspective, the chances of success in an application for re-trial are extremely limited. Since 1948, the Supreme Court has granted a re-trial in only 28 cases, which resulted in the exoneration of 21 convicts. Thus, one of the important challenges that the Public Defender’s Office has focused upon in recent years is the need to bring about change within Israeli society and its legal system in respect to recognition and treatment of wrongful convictions.

Under the Israeli Public Defender Law, the National Public Defender can file a request for re-trial on behalf of a convict, if he or she “determined that there is room to file a request for re-trial on his behalf”. Over the past few years, the Re-trial Department in the Israeli Public Defender’s Office has received between 30-40 applications a year, and following a long and tedious process, filed on average one request a year.

In my presentation, I intend to focus on the extent to which the Public Defender’s Office may take into account its institutional role and aspirations when deciding upon the cases it chooses to pursue and the manner in which these cases should be presented. Examples for dilemmas that can arise in each of these two stages include 1) whether or not to file a request on behalf of inmates who raise only partial claims of innocence, and 2) to what extent a Public Defender’s Office should attempt to prove another person’s guilt as a means to secure its client’s innocence. Had it been a legal clinic, in the first example, or a private attorney, in the second example, I doubt if these issues would have been regarded as problematic, but in the context of a Public Defender’s Office it is unclear how they ought to be approached and to what extent strategic and ideological considerations should impact the way these applications and cases are handled.


Stephanie Roberts, University of Westminster, UK
My presentation looks at the role of defence lawyers in wrongful convictions in England and Wales. I am currently doing an empirical study on our Court of Appeal and I will be using a sample from that where the grounds of appeal have been lawyer errors to see which ones will result in the conviction being overturned. We have had a large number of cases here where asylum seekers have been wrongly convicted of criminal offences such as arriving with a false passport because their lawyer has not explained to them that there is a statutory defence available and they have pled guilty to the charge. The Court of Appeal has now dealt with a number of these and quashed the conviction so I can link the discussion of defence lawyer ethics.  In the limited time for presentations, I will go through the empirical findings of what errors result in an overturned conviction.


CURRENT ISSUES IN PROSECUTION ETHICS 

Shawn Marie Boyne, IU McKinney School of Law, US
For decades, German prosecutors were bound by the principle of mandatory prosecution that mandated that they prosecute any case in which sufficient evidence exists to suspect that a crime has occurred. Beginning in the 1970s however, changes in the legislative code and changes in prosecutorial practice began to erode the force of that principle.  As a result, in the vast majority of “minor” crime, cases are settled with a fine, a deferred sentence, or a dismissal.  At first glance, this practice appears to be consistent with American plea bargaining. However, in contrast to American practice, the crimes that fall into the “minor” crimes category include crimes that are considered to be felonies in the United States, notably rape and corruption. Though those classification decisions are made by the German legislature, they are compounded by the organizational incentives in German prosecution offices that favor efficiency over painstaking investigation and prosecution. These factors, plus the German system’s comparatively lenient sentencing practices, play a large role in explaining why German prosecutions have not fueled an American-style incarceration explosion. In domestic violence and rape cases, these factors prevent German prosecutors from using the criminal justice system to reinforce the goal of gender equality.  Indeed, German prosecutors’ turn towards efficiency has undermined what Damaska labelled as the role of the activist state in the criminal justice process.

Because lay jurors in Germany seldom affect a case’s judicial outcome, there are three main “checks” on prosecutorial decision-making. To begin, victims may appeal a prosecutor’s dismissal decision to the General Public Prosecutors Office. Also, assuming that a sex crimes case makes it to trial, German law allows victims to be represented by a private prosecutor (Nebenklager) who functions like a party in the American system. Finally, if a prosecutor’s work product falls below standards or if a prosecutor breaks the law, the prosecutor may face administrative sanctions.

In this presentation, I argue that taken together, these checks on prosecutorial discretion do not adequately protect victims of sex crimes and domestic violence. As I point out the deficiencies of these systems of control, I will address the question: Why aren’t prosecutors more assertive in prosecuting these types of cases? Is it simply a matter of resources or is it attributable to larger issues in German society?


Marny Requa, Georgian Court University, US
This talk focuses on decisions to pursue criminal cases against police officers and members of the military in Chile for torture and mistreatment. The Chilean criminal justice system has undergone significant reform since 2000. Incidents that arose before the reforms are still dealt with under the old system, generally with magistrates investigating and making prosecutorial decisions after private parties have initiated a case. In the past 15 years, magistrates have been more willing to prosecute these cases. Recent incidents are most commonly prosecuted by a new, independent public prosecutor’s office (Ministerio Público), although a vast number of these are not pursued. Decision-making in both types of cases raises political as well as ethical considerations that have changed over time, a point emphasized in empirical research conducted as part of an ongoing research project titled Lawyers, Conflict and Transition, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The talk will cover key points from that research impacting on prosecutorial decisions as well as formal and informal forms of accountability.


Lawrence Hellman, Oklahoma City University School of Law, US
Prosecutorial misconduct is now understood to be widespread in the American criminal justice system.  Official misconduct was a factor in half of the 1800+ known wrongful convictions in the United States that have been corrected by post-conviction remedies since 1989.  However, existing accountability systems provide insufficient deterrents to misconduct by prosecutors, and they do little to motivate and enable prosecutors to deter official misconduct on the part of other state actors involved in prosecutions.

I propose consideration of a new approach to prosecutorial accountability that draws on the successful transition to a proactive management-based regulatory system that has been adopted in Australia for incorporated legal services providers.  I will describe how a proactive management-based model of prosecutor accountability might function and suggest how it might be implemented without necessarily applying it to the entire American legal profession.  The proactive model would supplement, not replace, the current reactive system.  It would be designed to reduce not only the misconduct of prosecutors themselves, but also misconduct of other state actors, such a police, investigators, and laboratory scientists.  By reducing official misconduct in the criminal advocacy process, wrongful convictions should become less common and meritorious prosecutions should reach more reasonable outcomes.


Kellie Toole, University of Adelaide, Australia
In Australia, a prosecutor must be satisfied of a ‘reasonable prospect of conviction’ before prosecuting a person for a serious crime. The assessment of the reasonable prospects often involves a relatively objective assessment of available evidence. However, ethical issues arise where witness credibility is critical, as with sex offences, and jury decisions can be unpredictable or even undesirable. Prosecutors have to decide whether to proceed where they assess that a jury might convict but should not, or might not convict but should. This situation raises issues about the prosecutorial role of the community (through the jury) and the State (through the prosecutor), and the fine line between prosecutors properly exercising their discretion, and improperly usurping the decision-making role of the jury.

Implications of the Suit Against the President’s Immigration Order

The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a challenge to President Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program (DAPA) and an expanded version of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). Texas and twenty-five other states sued the administration to prevent DAPA’s implementation on three grounds.

Here are some initial thoughts from Vanessa H. Merton, Professor of Law and Director of the Immigration Justice Clinic at Pace Law School, about the relevance of this ruling to the criminal justice community. She notes:

If the plaintiff states were to prevail in this case, it should mean that a citizen could  sue a local district attorney for 1) failing to take care to faithfully execute the law because s/he has not rounded up and prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law every single litterer whose lawless littering may have diminished the value of my property, or 2) failing to enforce  to the maximum – no plea-bargaining – every single inspection sticker violation, noncompliant equipment violation, or moving violation that might conceivably cause excess traffic and the risk of unsafe vehicles.  As much as prosecutorial discretion can be abused, a world without this kind of prosecutorial discretion would be absurd and dysfunctional.

Ironically, the temporary suspension of deportation available in these Presidential executive-order programs would not be available to most people who have any significant involvement with the criminal justice system.  No one with either a felony conviction or a conviction for many misdemeanors can qualify.

Related Readings:

A Prosecutorial Misconduct Commission?

Pace Professor Bennett Gershman makes a case for the establishing a prosecutorial misconduct commission, as New York considers doing just that.  Read the article in The Daily Beast titled How to Hold Bad Prosecutors Accountable: The Case for a Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct.

NY Court of Appeals Ducks a Decision on a Troubling Mens Rea Issue

POST WRITTEN BY: Professors Peter Widulski and Bennett L. Gershman

In April 2011, a man exited a subway train at a station in Manhattan and encountered a police sergeant and two other police officers. The officers reported that the man shouted obscenities and gesticulated at them and accused them of blocking his access to a stairway to an upper platform. They further reported that the man continued to swear at them as the sergeant followed him up the stairs. The sergeant reported that his intention in following the man – subsequently identified as Richard Gonzalez – was to issue Gonzalez a summons for disorderly conduct. While following Gonzalez, the sergeant noticed the handle of what appeared to him to be a knife in Gonzalez’s back pocket. After detaining Gonzalez on suspicion of disorderly conduct, the sergeant seized the item in Gonzalez’s back pocket and determined that it was a “gravity knife” because the blade in the handle snapped and locked into place upon flicking the wrist holding the handle. Under New York’s Penal Law it is a crime to possess a “gravity knife.”

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office indicted Mr. Gonzalez for criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, pursuant to Penal Law § 265.02 (1), which, in conjunction with Penal Law § 265.01 (1), subjects a defendant to third degree criminal possession of a gravity knife, a felony, if the defendant was previously convicted of a crime. Prior to trial, the defendant moved to suppress evidence of his possession of the knife on the ground that his detention for disorderly conduct was unlawful, and therefore the seizure of the knife was the fruit of the unlawful arrest. The defendant’s motion was denied, and a jury subsequently convicted him of third degree criminal possession of a weapon. He was sentenced to 3 ½ to 7 years in state prison.

On appeal, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, unanimously held that the facts supported probable cause to arrest the defendant for disorderly conduct. People v. Gonzalez, 112 A.D.3d 440 (1st Dep’t 2013). The court further unanimously held that the only mens rea element the prosecution had to prove regarding possession of a gravity knife was that the defendant knew he possessed a knife “in general,” rejecting defendant’s argument that the prosecution needed to prove that he knew the knife he possessed had the characteristics of a gravity knife.

Leave to appeal to the Court of Appeals was granted, and on April 28, 2015, the Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the Gonzalez case at the Judicial Institute on the campus of Pace Law School. Although the parties argued both the probable cause issue and the mens rea issue, it appeared to us that the Court’s questions focused primarily on the issue of whether the prosecution needed to prove that the defendant knew that he possessed a knife with the characteristics of the prohibited “gravity knife.” And to observers, it appeared that the Court was clearly troubled by this issue. Gonzalez’s appellate counsel informed the Court of the undisputed facts that Gonzalez had purchased the knife – a “Husky” brand utility knife which he used in his long-time work as an independent contractor – at a Home Depot store some five years earlier. Counsel argued forcefully, and several of the judges appeared to accept the argument – that fairness required the prosecution to prove that Gonzalez knew that the knife he lawfully purchased for his work had the characteristics of a gravity knife. Indeed, in watching the back and forth, we were reminded of the famous Supreme Court decision, Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246 (1952), taught in every first-year law school class, in which Justice Robert Jackson wrote: “A relation between some mental element and punishment for a harmful act is almost as instinctive as the child’s familiar exculpatory ‘But I didn’t mean to,’ and has afforded the rational basis for a tardy and unfinished substitution of deterrence and reformation in place of retaliation and vengeance as the motivation for public prosecution.”

In the face of the persistent and probing questions put to her by several of the judges, the prosecutor argued that the Legislature intended only that a person know simply that he possessed a knife, not whether the knife had the characteristics of a prohibited weapon. When Judge Eugene Pigott pressed her with hypothetical situations in which someone might possess quite innocently a lawfully purchased gravity knife, counsel stated that prosecutorial discretion might be used to avoid unfair prosecutions. Judge Pigott responded by noting that such discretion could lead to discriminatory results, based perhaps on a prosecutor’s consideration of the defendant’s race, or other improper considerations.

In a decision issued on June 15, 2015, the New York Court of Appeals unanimously reversed. But the Court reversed the Appellate Division not on the weapon possession issue but on the ground that “there is no record support for the motion court’s determination that defendant’s rant against the police officers constituted the crime of disorderly conduct.” Thus, the Court was able to avoid addressing the troubling issue regarding whether there is any mental culpability requirement for possession of a weapon, besides the requirement that the person know he possesses an object, which turns out to be a prohibited item.

Why courts avoid decisions on some issues really goes to the heart of the judicial process. Courts typically do not reach out to decide difficult-to-resolve questions if they do not have to. This is especially true when a court confronts issues relating to the legitimacy of a statute, or an interpretation of a statute that may break new ground. Clearly, the weapons issue in Gonzalez was a broader and much more difficult question than the detention issue, a purely legal question. The Court ducked the weapons issue knowingly, and probably with the knowledge that it would confront a similar issue again, and on a record making a resolution more likely.

Revised ABA Criminal Justice Standards

The American Bar Association has published its Fourth Edition of the ABA Criminal Justice Standards for the Prosecution and Defense Functions, adopted by a resolution 107D in February 2015. This edition supplants the Third Edition (1993) of the ABA Standards for Criminal Justice: Prosecution Function and Defense Function. Among the new provisions are the following:

For the Prosecution

  • Standard 3-1.3 – The Client of the Prosecutor – explicitly stating that a victim is not a prosecutor’s client.
  • Standard 3-3.6 – When Physical Evidence with Incriminating Implications is Disclosed by the Defense – stating that “[w]hen physical evidence is delivered to the prosecutor consistent with defense function standard 4-4.7, the prosecutor should not offer the fact of delivery as evidence before a fact-finder for purposes of establishing the culpability of defense counsel’s client.”
  • Standard 3-4.3 – Minimum Requirements for Filing and Maintaining Criminal Charges – stating in subsection (d) that “[a] prosecutor’s office should not file or maintain charges if it believes the defendant is innocent, no matter what the state of the evidence.”
  • Standard 3-5.c – The Decision to Recommend Release or Seek Detention – recommending that prosecutor should favor pretrial release over detention unless detention is necessary to protect individuals or the community. Additionally, prosecutor should remain open to reconsideration of pretrial detention.
  • Standard 3-5.8 – Waiver of Rights as Condition of Disposition Agreements – requiring a prosecutor not to condition a disposition agreement on a waiver of the right to appeal the terms of a sentence, on any waiver of post-conviction claims, or a complete waiver of the right to file habeas corpus petition, fully incorporating the DOJ policy banning waiver of ineffective counsel claim as a condition to guilty plea, as discussed here.
  • Standards in Part VIII Relating to Appeals and Other Conviction Challenges
    • Standard 3-8.1 – Duty to Defend Conviction Not Absolute – requiring prosecutor to exercise one’s own independent professional judgment and discretion and thus allowing the prosecutor to decline prosecution if she “believes the defendant is innocent or was wrongfully convicted, ….”
    • Standard 3-8.3 – Responses to New or Newly Discovered Evidence or Law – placing emphasis on seeking justice by requiring prosecutors offices to develop policies and procedures to address situations in which the prosecutor learned of credible evidence ‘creating a reasonable likelihood that a defendant was wrongfully convicted or sentenced or is actually innocent, ….”
    • Standard 3-8.4 – Challenges to the Effectiveness of Defense Counsel – requiring the prosecutor to intervene if he observes that defense counsel may be ineffective.
    • Standard 3-8.5 – Collateral Attacks on Conviction

For Defense Counsel

  • Standard 4-2.3 – Right to Counsel at First and Subsequent Judicial Appearances – stating that “[a] defense counsel should be made available in person to a criminally-accused person for consultation at or before any appearance before a judicial officer, including the first appearance.”
  • Standard 4-5.4 – Consideration of Collateral Consequences – placing a requirement on the defense counsel to “identify and advise the client of collateral consequences that may arise from charge, plea or conviction.”
  • Standard 4-5.5 – Special Attention to Immigration Status and Consequences – taking standard 4-5.4 one step further by incorporating the decision of Padilla v. Kentucky, 559 U.S. 356 (2010) (slip opinion copy) (requiring defense counsel to advise his client of potential immigration consequences as a result of guilty plea).
  • Standard 4-9.4 – New or Newly-Discovered Law or Evidence of Innocence or Wrongful Conviction or Sentence – placing a duty on the defense counsel to act if she “becomes aware of credible and material evidence or law creating a reasonable likelihood that a client or former client was wrongfully convicted or sentenced or was actually innocent.”