Why are their no real consequences for prosecutorial misconduct?

There’s no balancing of the books when you lose two and a half decades of your life to prison, Michael Morton says. He can’t make up for missing his son Eric’s childhood while he was stuck behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit.

“We’re starting from square one,” he says. “Today’s a new day and it’s a new experience and it’s a new life, and you make the best of what you have.”

Eric was 3 when Morton was sent to prison for his wife’s 1986 murder. It would be 25 years before DNA exonerated him. When the murder charge was dismissed in December, it was Texas’ 86th overturned conviction since 1989. But had the district attorney who prosecuted Morton turned over all the evidence in his files during the trial, the former grocery store manager and his lawyers argue, the entire tragedy could have been thwarted.

Now, in a rare court of inquiry that is being watched statewide, Morton is pursuing criminal charges against Williamson County state district Judge Ken Anderson, the former prosecutor who tried his case — and who made errors a judge ruled contributed to Morton’s wrongful imprisonment. Morton is also urging legislators to implement new laws that hold prosecutors accountable for serious missteps.
 
Prosecutors have long enjoyed relative immunity for mistakes they make in their work. A Texas Tribune examination of 86 overturned convictions between 1989 and 2011 revealed that courts found prosecutor errors in nearly 25 percent of the cases. Most of the errors contributed to the wrong outcome, and the 21 men and women involved in those cases spent a total of more than 270 years in prison before their convictions were overturned.

The State Bar does not track prosecutor discipline separately from other lawyers. But Linda Acevedo, the chief disciplinary counsel for the State Bar who has been at the agency since 1985, says she can recall three prosecutors who were publicly reprimanded. None of the reprimands were related to the 86 wrongful convictions.

In the wake of Morton’s case and other high-profile exonerations, some lawmakers and reform advocates have joined his call for new laws to hold prosecutors accountable for mistakes that derail the lives of the wrongly convicted and their families.

Both prosecutors and defense lawyers agree that the vast majority of state lawyers are ethical and take the consequences of their decisions seriously.

“Human error is a natural part of any process,” Shannon says.

Prosecutors must often balance their constitutional duty to seek the truth with the demands of traumatized victims and a nervous public that wants to see a culprit apprehended.

And, Shannon says, district attorneys rely heavily on police investigations. If police work is sloppy or incomplete or if witnesses provide conflicting statements, the truth can be obscured even from prosecutors with the best intentions.

But tunnel vision can become a problem for both prosecutors and police, and it’s one that Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins says he has seen often in wrongful convictions. He created a conviction integrity unit that boosted Dallas County’s exoneration numbers to the highest in the state: 37 between 1989 and 2011.

Often, he says, police and prosecutors had made up their minds about a suspect too early in their investigation.

“As evidence comes in, we have to follow that path,” Watkins says. “There’s a failure to follow the other leads.”

Jennifer Laurin, an assistant professor at the University of Texas School of Law who teaches criminal law, says that when the brain is convinced of a particular scenario, people often have trouble processing incompatible information.

Under the Brady rule, named for a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision, prosecutors are required to provide defendants with exculpatory evidence — information that might prove they didn’t commit the crime. Under Texas law, prosecutors are allowed to decide which information in their files is exculpatory. But if a prosecutor is convinced that a person is guilty, he or she may be unable to recognize evidence that would be exculpatory, Laurin says.

In 17 of the 21 overturned Texas cases with prosecutorial errors, the courts ruled that exculpatory evidence was not given to defense lawyers.
http://www.texastribune.org/library/multimedia/errors-in-judgment/#calls-for-change