Politicians were dancing and singing all in Chicago after U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald announced he would step down, says Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. "I can hear the champagne corks popping all the way over here, and I'm in Virginia," said banker and Illinois' former U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (no relation), the Republican who sacrificed his political career by recommending Pat Fitzgerald. Patrick Fitzgerald, the political untouchable who terrified the bipartisan Combine that runs Illinois, spent nearly 11 years fighting corruption and crime here. He's served enough. He and his wife have two young children. Balancing the prosecutor's job and a family has got to be impossible.
The score card: Two successive governors in prison on corruption charges, the bosses of the Chicago Outfit, and other crooked payrollers too numerous to count. "Pat Fitzgerald went after corruption. He was untouchable. The Combine couldn't get near him. He put the blindfold back on justice in Chicago," Peter Fitzgerald said. "He went after wrongdoing wherever he found it, high and low, at City Hall, in the Republican White House, regardless of politics. He was really something special." Pat Fitzgerald will step down officially June 30. Speculation involves whether he'll be named FBI director, a job he wanted. Peter Fitzgerald was inspired to find an untouchable after reading the biography of Chicago Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormick. The Colonel was warring with Al Capone and asked President Herbert Hoover to send untouchables to hunt down the gangster.
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As jury deliberations enter their third day in former presidential candidate John Edwards's political corruption trial in Greensboro, N.C., the U.S. Department of Justice has a lot riding on his case, too, says the Raleigh News & Observer. Justice's public-integrity section has been under scrutiny since the bungled 2008 case against former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK).
Since the Stevens case, the unit has a new chief, former New York-based federal prosecutor Jack Smith. The Justice Department also has ordered training to make sure prosecutors disclose key evidence to defense attorneys. Kieran Shanahan, a former federal prosecutor who sat through the trial, said Edwards – if convicted – would likely receive a concurrent sentence and serve no more than five years. Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University and co-author of “The Prosecution and Defense of Public Corruption,” said a not-guilty verdict would be “a black eye” for the Justice Department. “It would call into question their decision even to pursue the case,” Henning added.
Last year, there were 12,686 reported domestic violence crimes in Nashville's Davidson County, including nine homicides. Two domestic violence prosecutors handled most of those cases, each averaging about 250 cases every week, The Tennessean reports. Mayor Karl Dean says they need help. He is seeking two more domestic violence prosecutors, part of an ongoing top-to-bottom audit to identify how Nashville can improve the way it addresses domestic violence, from investigation and prosecution to victim services.
“We need to send a message that Nashville is a safe city for women and children,” Dean said. Tennessee has a deplorable reputation for domestic violence. Since 2001, it has ranked among the Top 10 states with the highest rates of women murdered by men. The state has been included on that list every year but 2009, says the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit Washington-based public safety research and advocacy organization. It has ranked in the Top 5 five times, including the past two years.
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There is no epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct in Texas, says former prosecutor Shannon Edmonds, now with the Texas District & County Attorneys Association. Writing in the Austin American-Statesman, Edmonds says that, "claims about the prevalence of prosecutorial misconduct have been blown out of proportion, in this case by proponents of change playing fast and loose with the facts in an effort to bolster their claims."
Texas appellate courts reviewed 69,000 criminal cases between 2004 to 2008. Citing a recent study, Edmonds says that even all of the 91 cases of prosecutorial misconduct are true, it was a minuscule 0.1 percent of appeals. Courts found that 72 of the 91 errors to be "harmless." Edmonds argues that the courts define misconduct to include a criminal defendant failing to receive helpful evidence that even a scrupulous prosecutor never knew existed. "That is hardly the kind of thing that most people in the real world would label misconduct in their own job, but it is the sort of thing for which some defendants demand a prosecutor's head on a platter," Edmonds says.
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The pending prosecutorial misconduct case against Texas Judge Ken Anderson in the Michael Morton wrongful conviction made national headlines because, as a recent article in the Yale Online Law Review documents, our system rarely disciplines, much less brings criminal charges against, prosecutors who have engaged in intentional misconduct. Barry Scheck of The Innocence Project writes in the Austin American-Statesman.
Far too often, prosecutors, who wield enormous power over our lives, aren't investigated at all, even for intentional misconduct that has led to a wrongful conviction, much less "harmless" intentional misconduct in cases in which the defendant was guilty, Scheck says. What can be done to reform the system? One remedy, civil litigation, is increasingly unavailable. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court severely limited the ability of wrongfully convicted plaintiffs to hold a district attorney's office accountable for intentional acts of misconduct by line prosecutors. Scheck says that just because there are only a few bad actors doesn't mean we should sit back and do nothing. When a bridge collapses, we conduct an investigation to find the root of the problem. When an airplane crashes, we do everything in our power to find out what went wrong. When a prosecutor withholds evidence that could have prevented someone from being wrongly convicted, we're lucky if we ever find out about it.
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Federal prosecutors acknowledged errors in the scientific evidence that helped send Santae Tribble of Washington, D.C., man to prison for 28 years for murder and took the extraordinary step of agreeing to have his conviction overturned, reports the Washington Post. U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen stopped short of declaring him innocent. Tribble, 51, was found guilty of the 1978 murder of a taxi driver. His case was featured last week by the Post, which said that Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to convictions of innocent people.
In Tribble's case, prosecutors and the FBI lab were incorrect in linking a hair found near the murder scene to Tribble. Three former senior FBI lab experts and a national civil liberties group joined calls for the Justice Department to review testimony in all convictions nationwide that depended on FBI hair evidence before 1996. U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) urged the Justice Department to review its handling of 250 questionable convictions identified by the Post, most of which relied on hair comparisons. "Obviously, if there are problems in D.C., there are problems across the country,” said Virginia Sloan, president of The Constituion Project. “To think this kind of testimony or potentially flawed evidence is limited to a particular location makes no sense.”
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By Maurice Possley
A coalition of advocacy groups on a national tour reveals study showing prosecutorial error in 20 cases between 2004-2008.
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Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper has signed a bill that will dramatically curb prosecutors' ability to charge juveniles as adults through the state's longstanding "direct file" system, reports the Denver Post. The bill passed the legislature by wide margins and with bipartisan support but was bitterly opposed by prosecutors and other law enforcement officials. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, said he struggled with whether to sign the bill but decided the wave of bipartisan support among lawmakers was hard to ignore. Kim Dvorchak of the Colorado Juvenile Defender Coalition said the law had "restored due process for youth to have judicial review before being tried as an adult."
Opponents, such as Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican, said Hickenlooper's signature was the wrong decision. "Gov. Roy Romer and state lawmakers established Colorado's direct-file system in the early 1990s in response to an alarming and continuous increase in violent crime committed by juveniles," Suthers said. "Since then, prosecutors across the state have judiciously used the system to address the most serious, violent juvenile offenders who posed serious risks to the public safety. This new law not only ignores the lessons of history, but also the benefits of the direct-file system, including Colorado's Youthful Offender System, which has rehabilitated numerous juvenile offenders."
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A 17-year-old alleged rape victim – detained for a day on a warrant to ensure her appearance in court against the man accused of attacking her – has been freed by a judge in Sacramento but must wear an electronic monitor, reports the city's Bee. "This case has charted thankfully rare legal territory," said Judge Lawrence G. Brown. "It represented a difficult balancing of protecting the community from an alleged violent criminal and ensuring the integrity of the court subpoena process of a critical witness."
The teen is one of two reported victims in the case against Frank William Rackley Sr., 37, who is scheduled for trial Monday. She was scheduled to testify against Rackley at his preliminary hearing and then at his trial, originally set for Feb. 28. She failed to appear for either session. She was abducted last year from a light-rail station and then driven away and raped by Rackley, according to the criminal complaint. She is reportedly terrified to face Rackley. The judge told the girl, "I am truly sorry for all that you have been through. I hope that you have been strengthened by the outpouring of community support and concern for you. You have demonstrated great courage for a young woman and may you continue to do so in the upcoming trial of Mr. Rackley."
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/17/4419183/victim-of-alleged-sacramento-rape.html#storylink=cpy
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Las Vegas police routinely arrest lawbreakers in its casino area, but justice often is elusive, says the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Police are frustrated by minor offenses that appear to have no consequences for offenders who skip court dates or don't face justice, their cases dismissed because judges have more severe problems to handle. Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson is studying a proposal to create a night court on the Strip where offenders would be forced to pay up, and instead of putting offenders in jail, fine them heavily that same night and quickly send them on their way.
It's welcome news for Police Capt. Todd Fasulo, whose Convention Center Area Command officers patrol the Strip. "We get bombarded from hotel complaints and continue to write the same 50 to 60 tickets for the same people," Fasulo said. "The judges dismiss it because there's no way they're going to put somebody in jail for selling a bottle of water. We're telling (officers) to go out there, and they're thinking, 'Why keep spinning my wheels?' That's when a level of frustration kicks in," he said. A prosecutor is studying Philadelphia Municipal Court's Nuisance Night Court model, a mobile court program that began in 1996 using volunteer judges to hear low-level cases, including underage drinking and disorderly conduct, among others. The goal is to deter crime by assessing civil penalties, such as community service and court fines, to offenders while keeping them out of jail.
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Critics who have demanded that George Zimmerman be arrested for killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old, waited another day yesterday as...
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Damien Doxley, 34, who served 11 years in Missouri prisons on drugs and weapons charges, clings to values he learned while he was "in the game," says...
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Some bond agents and the criminal defendants they bailed out catch a lucky break from judges in Tarrant County, Tx., says the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram in the second of a series. Say the bail bondsman loses track of a suspect but hears his family saw him at a buddy's place. Instead of declaring the bond forfeited, the judge may declare it "insufficient" to give the bondsman more time to haul the suspect in. Then maybe the judge gets busy and loses track, or the court forgets to flag the case for the judge to reconsider.
Months go by, even years. With the bond in limbo, the bond agent might lose interest in tracking the suspect down, and the district attorney can't try to collect. "I don't even see those," said a prosecutor who handles bond forfeitures. Since 2009, judges in Tarrant County have declared about $73 million in felony and misdemeanor bonds insufficient.
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In 91 criminal cases in Texas since 2004, the courts decided that prosecutors committed misconduct, ranging from hiding evidence to making improper arguments to the jury, according to Innocence Project data. Yet none of those prosecutors has ever been disciplined, reports the Texas Tribune. “It paints a bleak picture about what’s going on with accountability and prosecutors,” said Cookie Ridolfi, founder of the Northern California Innocence Project, who researched misconduct data in Texas and other states.
At a symposium this week in Austin, exonerees, lawyers and legal scholars discussed the need for increased accountability for prosecutors. The symposium was part of a national accountability campaign by the New York-based Innocence Project. Prosecutorial misconduct has become a national issue in the wake of the high-profile exoneration cases, including one prosecuted by Ken Anderson in Williamson County, Texas. A man served 25 years of a life sentence before DNA results showed last year that he was innocent. His lawyers discovered that Anderson did not turn over evidence that could have led to his acquittal. A rare court of inquiry is scheduled to consider whether Anderson committed criminal misconduct.
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Henry S. Ruth Jr., a well-known voice in anticrime policies over the years, died on March 16 at 80. As the New York Times reports, Ruth was better known for helping lead the prosecution of Nixon administration officials involved in covering up the Watergate break-in and kept it on track when President Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the "Saturday Night Massacre." Ruth, Cox's deputy, was credited with holding the office together.
Earlier, Ruth had served as deputy staff director of the crime commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson. He later worked in the Justice Department's research arm, then known as National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. He also served as criminal justice coordinator for New York City under Mayor John V. Lindsay. With law professor Kevin Reitz, he co-authored a book, The Challenge of Crime: Rethinking Our Response
(Harvard University Press, 2003).
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