prosecutor ethics

Now THIS Is An Unethical Prosecutor!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ray County (Missouri) Prosecutor Camille Johnston, 46, had “inappropriate sexual affairs “with three men, including a defense attorney representing several criminal defendants in cases prosecuted by Ray County, and Juan David Gutierrez an illegal immigrant accused of sexually assaulting another woman.  The third unethical sexual relationship was with yet another defendant in a criminal case, and Johnston fired the employee who discovered it.

Yikes. Even the late Steven Bochco didn’t dream up a prosecutor that sex-crazed, and all of his lawyers were in perpetual heat.

Johnston’s fling with Gutierrez was her masterpiece, however. Get this: Gutierrez was being prosecuted in Ray County, but this Ray County prosecutor gave him the keys to her car so he could flee to Florida, where she joined him on her vacation!

Johnston, the filings against her state, was guilty of an “obvious appearance of a conflict of interest” —- “Appearance”???? — had “forfeited the office of prosecuting attorney.” 

Yeah, I’d say that’s fair.

As soon as Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway filed documents to remove Johnston from office, a judge approved a preliminary order suspending her. 

I don’t understand this story at all. Did the woman have a psychotic break? How can someone rise to the level of prosecutor, or for that matter pass the bar after graduating from law school, who is capable of behaving this way? Maybe she learned she has only a year to live, and decided to go out with a bang…well, several bangs I guess. I would have guessed that she was hideous or something and desperate for a date, but she’s not. My next guess would have been that she was so sexually alluring that defendants and colleagues were constantly courting her, but that isn’t evident either. How could this happen?

And yet, over the past 20 years, I have been stunned and disillusioned by the low level of professional ethics of so many prosecutors, who are supposed to maintain exemplary ethics. I suppose having sex with anyone in pants is, all in all, not as unethical as knowingly prosecuting an innocent defendant, and that ethical breach is a lot more common than going on vacation with an illegal who assaults women.

__________________

Pointer: Young Bill

Ralph Petty, the Moonlighting Texas ADA, Strikes Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Back in 2021, an outrageous legal ethics scandal in Texas so disturbed me that I wrote virtually the same post about it twice, once in May and again in September, without realizing it until one of you reminded me. This time, however, I’m not repeating myself.

Former Texas attorney Weldon Ralph Petty Jr prosecuted defendants before Midland County judges as an assistant district attorney, while simultaneously working as a law clerk for some of the same judges, on occasion advising them regarding the criminal cases he was prosecuting. He did this for more than a decade, with the complicity of the judges and his colleagues. Finally another prosecutor blew the whistle on this unethical conduct, which even Fani Willis would recognize as a conflict of interest. Maybe.

Last month Petty, who was disbarred, appeared in the news again.

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The Rest Of The Story: The Mother Of That Six-Year-Old Who Shot His Teacher Is In Prison. GOOD!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

But some conservative pundits have a problem with that.

Ethics Alarms covered the revolting tale of the Newport News, Virginia second-grader who shot his teacher in a January post. The position here is and has always been that when children get their hands on guns and shoot anyone, including themselves, parents who own the guns should be held strictly responsible, and should go to jail. Amusingly, some commenters here thought I was jumping to conclusions assuming that parents were at fault in the Newport News case. “What happened to waiting for facts before making a judgement?” caviled one. MIA Ethics Alarms gadfly P.M. Lawrence (where have you been, P.M.?) offered several unlikely scenarios that didn’t involve parental misconduct. I was confident that Occam’s Razor applied, and that this was res ipsa loquitor: if a second grader shoots his teacher, the parents of that second grader are almost certainly at fault.

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Ethics Quiz: This…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This resurfaced video of the Senate Majority Leader gleefully tripping the light fantastic with the New York Democratic Attorney General, one of the party’s several prosecutors engaged in an effort to use the criminal justice system to hamstring Donald Trump before the 2024 election, raises several ethics questions, but I’ll focus on just one.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is participating in this public spectacle ethical conduct for a prosecutor?

Before I comment, let me just say…Ick.

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Why Must I Be A Blogging Ethicist In Ethics Zugzwang?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I was going to sing it, but it doesn’t fit the music…

Here is my problem…

Describing the ugly developments arising out of the Democratic Soviet-style show trial aimed at neutralizing Donald Trump by criminalizing his post election excesses, and, if possible, intimidating and harassing his supporters past and present, esteemed former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy writes in part, Continue reading →

The Tracey Harris Murder Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I stumbled across a year-old CBS “48 Hours” episode that depressed me about the state of ethics alarms in the culture, but to be fair, almost everything is doing that right now.

Tracey Harris (with her daughter, above) vanished from her home in Ozark, Alabama on March 7, 1990. A week later, her body was found in the nearby Choctawhatchee River, and the autopsy revealed that Tracey had drowned, though she had marks on her neck consistent with strangulation. Her death was ruled a homicide. Suspicion immediately fell on her ex-husband Carl, who had continued to live with Tracey and their young daughter after their divorce. He was rumored to be abusive, and had been having an affair with a local teen. Investigators believed, but could not prove, that Carl was the last person to see Tracey alive.

Police and prosecutors interviewed over a dozen neighbors and acquaintances of the Harrises, but there was never sufficient evidence to arrest Carl or seek an indictment. However, the community hostility inflamed by the widespread belief that Carl had murdered his popular former wife drove him to leave the county. Tracey’s parents adopted his daughter, who remains permanently estranged from him.

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Ethics Dunce: NY Prosecutor Mark Pomeranz

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Last week, the New York Times and other media gleefully reported that Mark  Pomeranz, one of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who was part of the “Get Trump” effort that has been ongoing in New York almost from the minute he was Trump elected President, believed that the he was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable.” This information came as his resignation letter somehow was released to the press.  Pomeranz submitted his resignation last month after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg stopped pursuing an indictment of Donald Trump. Bragg had picked up the long-running attempt to charge Trump from his predecessor Cyrus Vance, Trump’s own personal Javert, who did not run for re-election.

What neither the Times nor any other source bothered to point out was that Pomeranz’s public statement that Trump was guilty of crimes were bright line violations of prosecutor ethics both in New York and across the profession.

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If This Post Seems Like Déjà Vu, There’s A Good Reason: The Texas Law Clerk-Prosecutor [Update]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Justice scales bad

UPDATE: “I don’t understand how this could happen. Since it obviously can, I wonder how many other outrageous conflicts of interest are rotting the justice system while nobody is paying attention.”

That’s how I started this post when I wrote it yesterday. Here’s how I ended this post, from May 17, just four months ago: “…the fact that something like this could happen at all, and for so many years, should have ethics alarms sounding throughout the justice system, and not only in Texas.”

This is because the two posts are about exactly the same episode. The similarities didn’t ring a bell with me at all yesterday. A new appellate court opinion related to the same outrageous Texas conflict of interest breach came down this month, so I treated the whole episode as new. It took commenter Rich in CT’s note to alert me. (Thanks Rich.) So here are my thoughts while banging my head on my desk:

  • I apologize. It’s not as if there aren’t really new and horrible ethics stories to consider, especially in the law and the justice system. It’s OK if I waste my time, but its inexcusable to waste yours.
  • I like the first post better.
  • Silver lining: at least the posts don’t contradict each other.
  • The association of legal ethicists I belong to scooped the ABA on this one, discussing the prosecutor’s conduct long before the legal press caught up to it. One more reason to renew my membership.
  • I could write that this scandal is so outrageous that it is worthy of two posts, and maybe more. It is, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that I’m an idiot.
  • I think this has happened to me once before. But what do I know?

Once again, I’m sorry.

***

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has overturned the 2003 conviction and death sentence of Clinton Lee Young in a Sept. 22 opinion. Why? Oh, just one of those technicalities: on of the prosecutors in the case was moonlighting as a a clerk for the judge in the trial the trial and who considered the the convicted man’s habeas application. That’s all.

WHAT?????

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On Bill Cosby’s Get-Out-Of-Jail-Forever Card…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Bill Cosby4

The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court has overturned Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction, and the 83-year-old comedian/Jello pudding salesman/serial rapist will be released from prison with no chance of his having to go back, according to the ruling vacating his conviction issued yesterday.

Is that justice? Well, it’s a kind of justice, but only for Cosby. Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned his conviction because a previous prosecutor had granted him immunity from prosecution in order to force the Coz to admit to some of his criminal sexual activity. Cosby could not use the Fifth Amendment nor lie without risking perjury charges, so he made several incriminating statements on the record. These should not have been used to convict him later, but a different prosecutor determined that his office was not bound by the previous deal. But it was. Because Cosby’s statements were improperly used against him, the conviction was based on inadmissible evidence. This new ruling bars any retrial in the case.

Much as Bill Cosby deserves to rot in prison, upon reading the opinion, I see no way to criticize the decision. Even bad people have to be prosecuted and convicted the right way, and Cosby, who is about as bad as one can get, was not. I’m sure there is some reason why Cosby’s lawyer wasn’t able to block the use of his client’s damning but unusable testimony before Cosby had to spend time in jail, but so far, I can’t find it.

If a sociopathic predator like Bill Cosby can be freed on the basis of an unfair trial—and he can and should be—so can and should a brutal cop like Derk Chauvin, whose trial was also unfair, though for very different reasons. We shall see how far the integrity of the justice system goes.

Nobody is going to riot over Bill Cosby going free. That, I fear, might be the critical difference.

Post-Zoom Hangover Ethics, 3-31-21….

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

People, even lawyers, just do not interact much in remote seminars. It makes a three-hour session far more tiring, even though I’m sitting down, rather than stalking through the space. Thus I am blotto now, after a legal ethics session earlier today.

1. And THIS is the best paper in the U.S…Two headlines on the New York Times front page this morning my high school paper faculty advisor would have rejected…and he would have been right:

  • “Gaetz Said To Face Inquiry Over Sex With Underage Girl” The fact someone says it is not news. Is he “facing an inquiry” or isn’t he? “Three people briefed on the matter” isn’t a source: we’ve seen how accurate the Times anonymous sources are, especially when the subject is a Republican, a conservative, and a Trump supporter. Why the front page for a rumor? Slow news day? Hey, I’ve got an idea: How about an article about how Joe Biden called Georgia “sick” based on a complete misrepresentation?
  • “Taliban Believes The War’s Over And They Won.” This is psychic news again, my favorite fake news form. How does the Times know what the Taliban “thinks”? Who cares what it “thinks”?

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