According to Clarence Thomas and his equally reprehensible buddy Scalia, a man deliberately railroaded to death row is not entitled to any compensation after all, and never mind what any other court said.
I’m oversimplifying a little, but click through: it really is that simple. The DA’s office hid evidence in older to frame this guy, and nobody will go to jail or be held liable at all. Oops! Sorry we fucked your life!
Prosecutorial immunity has GOT to stop.
Chet, Normally I am with you, but I differ with you here.
Immunity from suit for prosecutors is a benefit to the society as a whole. Judge Learned Hand explained well the “balance of evils” underlying immunity in 1949. “It does indeed go without saying that an official, who is in fact guilty of using his powers to vent his spleen upon others . . . should not escape liability for the injuries he may so cause; and, if it were possible in practice to confine such complaints to the guilty, it would be monstrous to deny recovery. The justification for doing so is that it is impossible to know whether the claim is well founded until the case has been tried, and that to submit all officials, the innocent as well as the guilty, to the burden of a trial and to the inevitable danger of its outcome, would dampen the ardor of all but the most resolute, or the most irresponsible, in the unflinching discharge of their duties. Again and again the public interest calls for action which may turn out to be founded on a mistake, in the face of which an official may later find himself hard put to it to satisfy a jury of his good faith. There must indeed be means of punishing public officers who have been truant to their duties; but that is quite another matter from exposing such as have been honestly mistaken to suit by anyone who has suffered from their errors. As is so often the case, the answer must be found in a balance between the evils inevitable in either alternative. In this instance it has been thought in the end better to leave unredressed the wrongs done by dishonest officers than to subject those who try to do their duty to the constant dread of retaliation.”
The concerns of Judge Hand are very much real. Your state tax dollars go to defend hundreds of suits filed each year against prosecutors and state court judges. As the Assistant Attorney General responsible for overseeing the defense of these suits for the State of Mississippi, I can tell you first hand that criminal defendants (both those convicted and those acquitted) are quick to file suit alleging that the prosecutor violated his rights. Even with immunity, it takes time to get these cases dismissed. If there was no immunity, and each criminal defendant now sitting in prison was granted the right to take his prosecutor to trial, two results would happen. First, prosecutors (who are already over worked) would have no time to prosecute, but would be spending time testifying in civil suits to avoid a personal monetary judgment against them. Second, prosecutors (who are already underpaid) would not think it worth it to take the job if it had the risk that they and their family assets are subject to personal judgments from criminal defendants.
As the United States Supreme Court explained, “If a prosecutor had only a qualified immunity, the threat of s 1983 suits would undermine performance of his duties no less than would the threat of common-law suits for malicious prosecution. A prosecutor is duty bound to exercise his best judgment both in deciding which suits to bring and in conducting them in court. The public trust of the prosecutor’s office would suffer if he were constrained in making every decision by the consequences in terms of his own potential liability in a suit for damages. Such suits could be expected with some frequency, for a defendant often will transform his resentment at being prosecuted into the ascription of improper and malicious actions to the State’s advocate. Further, if the prosecutor could be made to answer in court each time such a person charged him with wrongdoing, his energy and attention would be diverted from the pressing duty of enforcing the criminal law.”
Finally, you might ask “why are prosecutors special? Why doesn’t everyone have immunity from suit, then?” The nature of a prosecutors’ work requires her to make daily decisions that are difficult and which have a tremendous impact on people. Most of us don’t have such responsibilities at all, let alone daily. In other words, the decisions most of make at work, even if wrong, are not likely to get us sued. Such is not the case for prosecutors.
Admittedly, prosecutors aren’t perfect; their immunity is a balance of societal objectives.
(Sorry for the delay; my comment spam countermeasures are still getting sorted out.)
All that is well and good, Harold, but at the end of the day there are many examples of prosecutorial misconduct where there are essentially no sanctions, such as here. If the immunity remains absolute, then the crimes will simply compound.
What, then, is the appropriate remedy for a man framed by prosecutors who then spent nearly 20 years in prison, and who was in fact nearly executed? They conspired to deprive a citizen of his liberty; surely there must be some punishment, and some compensation preferably at the expense of those who made these choices.