THE DEATH PENALTY AND PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT
memories of my early childhood years are filled with images of being safe and loved in a friendly world. I can see in my mind the school posters of "Our Neighborhood Helpers," the postman, the grocery man, and the school bus driver. I especially recall the poster of the huge, uniformed policeman holding the hand of a small blond girl. We were told that we could always ask a policeman to help us, and I felt safe knowing these men were in the world protecting me from harm. It would be many years before I began to question the tactics of the police and of the criminal justice system.
Prosecutorial misconduct is the practice of accusing, trying, and sentencing people to prison when it is known to the police and to the prosecutor that the person either is innocent or is highly likely to be innocent. Included in the tactics of prosecutorial misconduct are false arrest, destruction of evidence, withholding of evidence, forced confessions, and the use of jailhouse snitches who give false testimony in exchange for lesser sentences or other favors. Other tactics include improper jury instructions, failure to conduct pretrial investigations, failure to call key witnesses to testify at the trial, failure to provide competent, experienced defense counsel, and perjury by prosecution witnesses.
Coming to grips with the fact that these things happen wasn't easy for me, but the evidence was overwhelming. Since the United States Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, more than 82 people sentenced to death have been exonerated. Professor Larry Marshall of Northwestern University Law School in Chicago explains that "for every seven people who have been sentenced to death, one person has been found to be innocent." In nearly every one of the cases in which someone was wrongfully convicted, prosecutorial misconduct was the cause.
In February 2000, Illinois Governor George Ryan took the unprecedented step of putting all executions on hold because, over the past two decades, Illinois had freed more death row inmates than it had put to death. The Governor said the system was "fraught with error." Nebraska considered a similar halt to executions last year, but the governor vetoed a moratorium passed by the legislature.
A study conducted by the Chicago Tribune of homicide cases over the past 36 years in Cook County, Illinois, showed that 381 homicide convictions had been reversed because of prosecutors knowingly using false evidence or withholding evidence suggesting the defendant's innocence. Not a single prosecutor in those cases was brought to trial for the misconduct.
In recent months, the news has been filled with the story of wrongful convictions in Los Angeles. The "Rampart Scandal" began when an LAPD officer revealed information about corruption as part of bargaining to reduce his own criminal sentence. The resulting investigation revealed a cancer in the system which ran deep and had existed for a long time. By February 2000, LAPD Chief Bernard Parks had called for the dismissal of 120 cases of people who had been framed, and 20 LAPD officers had been relieved of duty, quit, or been fired. This devastating scandal occurred because of a feeling of impunity among officers in the Rampart station. They were a "fraternity" of people who could get away with unacceptable behavior with no fear of scrutiny by their like-minded peers. The system says that getting convictions is important. Winning is essential for career advancement. Winning is the way to get to be the police chief. And why not cheat when the system seems unwilling to prosecute the good guys for doing bad things? The truth is that every part of the criminal justice system, from policemen to prosecutors, defense counsels, judges, and juries, has played a role in developing the frightening system we have today.
Think of this. Approximately 2,000,000 people are in prison today. If only 1% of those people have been wrongfully convicted, then 20,000 innocent people are in prison. Obviously, we need a complete overhaul of the criminal justice system. Until this can be accomplished, we must stop allowing our error-prone system to decide who lives and dies. We must abolish the death penalty.
--Jody Cramer is an activist working: to end the death penalty, to free an innocent man on death row, to provide residential group homes for indigent, disabled adults as an option to nursing homes, and for animal rights. <jody@activist-etc.org> < http://www.activist-etc.org>