NYT Editorial: Justice and Prosecutorial Misconduct
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/opinion/justice-and-prosecutorial-misconduct.html?_r=1&hpJustice and Prosecutorial Misconduct
Published: December 28, 2011
Michael Morton was exonerated by DNA evidence this month after being wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and serving nearly 25 years in prison in Texas. In seeking to prove Mr. Morton’s innocence, his lawyers found in recently unsealed court records evidence that the prosecutor in the original trial, Ken Anderson, had withheld critical evidence that may have helped Mr. Morton.
The judge reviewing the case allowed Mr. Morton’s lawyers, including those from the Innocence Project, which represents prisoners seeking exoneration through DNA evidence, to gather facts about the prosecutor’s conduct. The Innocence Project’s report makes a compelling case that Mr. Anderson, now a state judge, disobeyed “a direct order from the trial court to produce the exculpatory police reports from the lead investigator” in the case
Mr. Morton’s lawyers have asked that the judge recommend a “court of inquiry” to investigate whether Mr. Anderson violated the law and should be charged in a criminal proceeding. While this process is an urgent matter for Mr. Morton, it is also a test of American justice — whether a prosecutor who flouts his duty under the Constitution to disclose crucial evidence to a defendant is subject to any meaningful sanction.
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Who will watch the watchmen? The question was first posed in Latin, but it is just as important today as it was 2,000 years ago. Power has to be kept in check, as the founders of our country knew when they designed a system of checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution. Any agency that has the power to protect us from enemies also has the power to do us great harm.
Police must be able to search for evidence, if they are to catch terrorists or other criminals. But when police can get access to information about us too easily, they regularly abuse their power. (See "Cops tap database to harass, intimidate."
It is vital to protect citizens from police intrusion. In the United States, we do this by requiring the police to go to court and obtain a search warrant.
Today the security forces want to be allowed to seize credit card information from Internet sites without a court order; they want to be able to record what URLs you look at without a court order, which can tell them such information as what books you have bought. There will be no difficulty getting a court to approve a search warrant when there is credible evidence of a terrorist plot, so they can investigate terrorists without this change. Whenever police ask to be allowed to bypass search warrants, we must be on guard.
We depend on the FBI to investigate suspected terrorists, but who else will it investigate? Probably any real political opposition, since the FBI has a long history of investigating dissidents purely for their political views. Martin Luther King Jr.'s phone was tapped; his life-long commitment to non-violence apparently was not enough reason to consider him non-threatening. More recently, John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was investigated by the FBI as a criminal suspect based on no evidence except his political views.
http://stallman.org/watchmen.html
