“Official misconduct damages truth-seeking by our criminal justice system and undermines public confidence.” Samuel Gross, National Registry of Exonerations Study
About half of wrongful convictions are the result of police or prosecutorial misconduct. The five most common problems are witness tampering, misconduct in the investigation, fabricating evidence, concealing exculpatory evidence, and misconduct at trial. Both police and prosecutors are likely to be carried away by a need to solve crimes and, especially for prosecutors facing reelection, by a perceived need to be “tough on crime” and a confusion between seeing that “justice is done” by convicting the right person, and the belief that convicting someone, guilty or innocent, is the prosecutor’s duty. In the case of Bernard Duse, both police and prosecutors displayed classic “tunnel vision,” refusing to investigate the two men who had borrowed his car and insisting on charging Mr. Duse, even though he had an alibi, did not fit the eyewitness identification, was not physically capable of having moved the body in the way the eyewitness described, and there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime.
References for Additional Reading
This is a story from The Innocence Project about aggressive prosecution in Texas led to a wrongful conviction. Read the story here:
Only One Prosecutor Has Ever Been Jailed for Misconduct Leading to a Wrongful Conviction (innocenceproject.org)
