Prosecutorial misconduct, allows defendants to receive shorter sentences.
A USA TODAY investigation has documented 201 cases since 1997 in which federal courts found that prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules. Each was so serious that judges overturned convictions, threw out charges or rebuked the prosecutors. And although the violations tainted no more than a small fraction of the tens of thousands of cases filed in federal courts each year, legal specialists who reviewed the newspaper's work said misconduct is not always uncovered, so the true extent of the problem might never be known.
USA TODAY found that in at least 48 of those cases, the defendants were convicted but, because of prosecutorial misconduct, courts gave them shorter sentences than they would have received otherwise. If prosecutors' chief motive for bending the rules is to ensure that guilty people are locked up, their actions often backfire.
USA TODAY's examination, based on tens of thousands of pages of government documents and court records, found that such arrangements — including promises of lenient sentences — are common when courts overturn convictions because of misconduct by prosecutors. They bring a quick end to cases that could embarrass the department or those in which the passage of time weakens the government's case. In most cases, the arrangements call for defendants to plead guilty to a crime in exchange for a shorter sentence than they originally received.
The plea bargains give both sides an opportunity to cut their losses, says Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and who reviewed USA TODAY's research.
"From the prosecutors' point of view, they just want to put that one aside and move on. That's an unpleasant memory," she says.
Justice Department records and court files from across the nation show that some of the people who walked away with shorter prison sentences because of misconduct returned to crime almost as soon as they went free.
In Washington, D.C., alone, court records show the Justice Department agreed to shorter prison sentences for at least eight convicted murderers during the past decade after judges and defense attorneys discovered that prosecutors had improperly concealed evidence that could have helped the defendants and their attorneys contest the charges.
Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2010-12-28-1Aprosecutorpunish28_CV_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip