I went to law school to be a prosecutor, and was one for about two weeks after I passed the Massachusetts Bar. Then I was quickly disillusioned, and realized that the weird, intrinsically ethically-conflicted criminal justice system was something out of which I had to get, and the sooner the better. I never looked back, and the situation is even worse now than I thought it was then.
Netflix has truly eye-opening and disturbing documentary about the subject of John Grisham’s only non-fiction book (out of more than 40). Both the book and the film are called “An Innocent Man,” and involve two criminal cases, both murder-rapes of young women, in the small town of Ada, Oklahoma in the Eighties. The title is ambiguous, for there isn’t just one innocent man, but four, all wrongly convicted of rape and murder because of police and prosecutorial misconduct of head-exploding magnitude. At the end of the documentary, two of the men had been freed after serving 12 years for a murder and rape with no physical evidence that incriminated them, and the remaining two were pursuing appeals. (One of them, who had been on death row, was finally freed last summer. The other has had his conviction overturned, but the state is appealing. Both of the men had been in prison for 35 years.)
The prosecutor was the same for both murder cases, and his comments defy belief. In one case, the actual murderer was the prosecution’s prime witness against the innocent men convicted, and evidence implicating him at the time of the crime was withheld by the Ada police who were involved with killer in a drug scheme. More evidence, so-called Brady material that prosecutors are required by law to reveal to defense attorneys, was illegally withheld by the DA. Asked if he owed an apology to the two men the jury convicted when the uncovered evidence prompted their release, the prosecutor’s reply was that he had nothing to apologize for, because he did his job.
No, his job is to try and convict guilty people. That case was finally blown up by the Innocence Project and DNA evidence.
The other case is even worse, believe it or not. A missing girl was seen by a single witness, from a distance, at night, being pulled into a car by two men. An artist’s crude approximation of the witness’s description led to the arrest of one suspectn, who was first shown to the witness, and then the witness was asked to pick him out of a line-up. (That’s an illegal line-up trick, as you can guess.) The second suspect was arrested because he knew the first suspect, and because one of the sketches vaguely resembled him. The first suspect, a young man known in the town as “slow,” confessed following r many hours of grilling by police and gave a detailed description of what the two men had done to the girl, including where they had buried her. Then the second man was led to confirm his own participation in the crime as it had been described by his friend. The taped confessions (and not the illegal questioning leading up to them, which was not recorded) were the only evidence presented at their trial.
Decades later, the body of the victim was found in a shallow grave 30 miles from where the convicted men had said she was buried. She was clothed in a dress bearing no resemblance to the one the men described. Most disturbing of all, forensics showed no evidence of rape, and she had been killed by a single bullet to the back of the head, not by stabbing. The men got a new trial, and were convicted again, with the same DA arguing for their guilt. His explanation: the girl was dead, they confessed to the killing, and the details don’t matter.
Among the 800 pages of Brady material withheld from the two men’s lawyers: a man who resembled one of the sketches had come to police and confessed to the murder before they were convicted.
Ethics Alarms 