Bob Gregory on prosecutor obligations
Bob Hurt
This is rather surreal. Prosecutors are officers of the
court and their principal obligation is to justice. They are obligated to
reveal to the defense attorney any exculpatory evidence. I am convinced
that many if not most of them place such obligations in last place, behind
winning for the sake of winning and building a strong record of success as a
stepping stone to higher office. In Illinois they are apparently attempting
to intimidate students working for justice and possibly to avoid allowing proof
of the innocence of long term convict.
Most of them seem to forget such court rulings as these:
Hurd v. People, 25 Mich 405, 416 (1872).
“ The prosecuting officer represents the public interest, which can never be promoted by the conviction of the innocent. His object like that of the court, should be simply justice; and he has no right to sacrifice this to any pride of professional success. And however strong may be his belief of the prisoner's guilt, he must remember that, though unfair means may happen to result in doing justice to the prisoner in the particular case, yet, justice so attained, is unjust and dangerous to the whole community”
In re Peasley, 90 P.3d 754 (Ariz. 2004).
Prosecutor’s interest in a criminal prosecution 'is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done; courts generally recognize that the ethical rules impose higher ethical standards on prosecutors.
Jeschke v. State, 642 P.2d 1298, 1303 (Wyo. 1982).
Prosecutors
must always keep in mind that duty is to seek justice, not merely to convict,
“which is most certainly a difficult duty to be carried out carefully and
cautiously.”
Do you remember the old radio and, later, TV program called "Mr. District
Attorney? Weekly his oath was a part of the show's introduction:
“ And it shall be my duty, not only to prosecute to the limit of the law all those charged with crimes within this country, but to defend with equal vigor the rights and privileges of all its citizens.”
Those were the good old
days (on radio and TV, that is).
Prosecutors Turn Tables on Student Journalists
By MONICA DAVEY
Published: October 24, 2009
EVANSTON, Ill. — For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of 11 inmates, the project’s director says, and an Illinois governor once cited those wrongful convictions as he announced he was commuting the sentences of everyone on death row.
David Protess, director of the Medill Innocence Project, says prosecutors are overreaching.
But as the Medill Innocence Project is raising concerns about another case, that of a man convicted in a murder 31 years ago, a hearing has been scheduled next month in Cook County Circuit Court on an unusual request: Local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students themselves.
The prosecutors, it seems, wish to scrutinize the methods of the students this time. The university is fighting the subpoenas.
Lawyers in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office say that in their quest for justice in the old case, they need every pertinent piece of information about the students’ three-year investigation into Anthony McKinney, who was convicted of fatally shooting a security guard in 1978. Mr. McKinney’s conviction is being reviewed by a judge.
Among the issues the prosecutors need to understand better, a spokeswoman said, is whether students believed they would receive better grades if witnesses they interviewed provided evidence to exonerate Mr. McKinney.
Northwestern University and David Protess, the professor who leads the students and directs the Medill Innocence Project, say the demands are ridiculously overreaching, irrelevant to Mr. McKinney’s case, in violation of the state’s protections for journalists and a breach of federal privacy statutes — not to mention insulting.
John Lavine, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism, said the suggestion that students might have thought their grades were linked to what witnesses said was “astonishing.” He said he believed that federal law barred him from providing the students grades, but that he had no intention of doing so in any case..
A spokeswoman for Anita Alvarez, the Cook County state’s attorney, who was elected last fall, said the prosecutors were simply trying to get to the bottom of the McKinney case.
“At the end of the day, all we’re seeking is the same thing these students are: justice and truth,” said Sally Daly, the spokeswoman. She said the prosecutors wished to see all statements the students received from witnesses, whether they supported or contradicted the notion of Mr. McKinney’s innocence.
“We’re not trying to delve into areas of privacy or grades,” Ms. Daly said. “Our position is that they’ve engaged in an investigative process, and without any hostility, we’re seeking to get all of the information they’ve developed, just as detectives and investigators turn over.”
If the courts find that Mr. Protess and the journalism school must turn over the student information, they risk being held in contempt if they refuse, said Dick O’Brien, a lawyer who is representing Northwestern.
But if the school gives in to such a demand, say advocates of the Medill Innocence Project and more than 50 similar projects (most involving law schools and legal clinics), the stakes could be still higher, discouraging students from taking part or forcing groups to devote time and money to legal assistance.
“Every time the government starts attacking the messenger as opposed to the message, it can have a chilling effect,” said Barry C. Scheck, a pioneer of the Innocence Project in New York, who said he had never seen a similar demand from prosecutors.
In October 2003, Mr. Protess’s investigative journalism classes began looking at the case after Mr. McKinney’s brother, Michael, brought it to the attention of the Medill Innocence Project — one of more 15,000 cases the project has been asked to consider investigating over the years.
Mr. Protess, who has been on the faculty at Northwestern since 1981 and began leading his investigative reporting students on such cases in 1991, created the Medill project in 1999, the same year he and his students drew national attention for helping to exonerate and free Anthony Porter, an inmate who had come within two days of execution.
The McKinney case took three years and nine teams of student reporters, all of whom have since graduated from Northwestern. In the end, the teams concluded that Mr. McKinney had been wrongly convicted of killing Donald Lundahl, a security guard, with a shotgun one evening in September 1978 in Harvey, a southern suburb of Chicago.
The students said they had found, among other things, that two eyewitnesses had recanted their testimony against Mr. McKinney and could not have seen him commit the killing because they were watching a boxing championship (Leon Spinks vs. Muhammad Ali). The students collected an affidavit from a gang member who, they say, confirmed Mr. McKinney’s alibi that he was running away from gang members when the shooting took place.
The students have also suggested alternative suspects in the case and offered witnesses who said they had heard the others admit their involvement.
In
2006, the students took their findings to the Center for
Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern’s law school, and by late last year,
the claims were being considered by a Cook County Circuit Court judge and were
described in an article in The Chicago Sun-Times and on the Medill
Innocence Project Web site.
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