Wrongful Conviction

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Did you know that prosecutorial misconduct is one of the leading causes of wrongful conviction? 42% of all exonerations involved misconduct or error by criminal justice officials but it is not limited to prosecutors. Prosecutorial misconduct is an illegal act or failing to act, on part of a prosecutor, especially an attempt to sway the jury to wrongly convict a defendant or to impose a harsher than appropriate punishment. Prosecutors have a lot of power when it comes to the defendant’s fate. Wrongful conviction has affected a lot people from the inmate getting released after the evidenced proved their innocence to after some inmates died on death row to them being innocent. How can we change the problem with wrongful convictions if the prosecutors …show more content…
Mr. Thompson was on death row for a 14 years for a crime he did not commit and he was later exonerated when an investigator found that lawyers in the New Orleans district attorney’s office had kept more than dozen pieces of evidence and even destroyed some that showed doubt on Mr. Thompson’s guilt. According to the article Beyond the Brady Rule “outrageous breaches of due process rights in such cases show that the Brady rule which seems essentially voluntary in some places is simply insufficient to ensure justice”(2013). In some cases the Brady rule is used voluntary and does not always show justice. In cases like John Thompson where the prosecution and the Supreme Court did not do right when it came to the trial because the prosecutor withheld evidence from the defense and the Supreme Court did not hold the prosecutor accountable and even stated “…the prosecutor’s office had not shown a pattern of “deliberate indifference” to constitutional …show more content…
Prosecutorial Misconduct by Bennett Gershman goes into detail of different ways prosecutors abuse and breaches the public’s trust. He also talks about the opportunities in the criminal justice system for misconduct and how prosecutors have exploited those opportunities over the years. Prosecutorial misconduct is seen a lot because the prosecutors feel like they are using their discretion or power to win the case by not turning over evidence and using faulty testimonies. Prosecutors have a set of ethics to follow but in a lot of the wrongful convictions cases with prosecutorial misconduct it seems that the prosecutors use their discretion by not turning over evidence, perjuring the witness to make fake confession to seeing the “defendants”. In the article Disciplining Prosecutors—Reform Proposals states, “professional responsibility measures are almost always ineffective in the prosecutorial misconduct context and as a result, sanctions and disciplinary measures have no real threat to prosecutors”(Yaroshefsky, 2015). With prosecutors not receiving any “real” punishment wrongful conviction cases can increase more and more because even thought a lot of the wrongful convictions victims are being exonerated the prosecutors are doing their jobs and are getting a pep talk about how they can change wrongful
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