Will Eric Holder hold these people accountable? Because at the very least, none of the people who took part in this coverup should still have jobs. Maybe they’re infected with the same disease I’ve seen in cops through the years: “Hey, if this guy didn’t do this particular crime, this is payback for all the times we didn’t catch him.”
To think that a man died to protect their reputation. Just unthinkable:
Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.
Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.
Not the defense attorneys, mind you. The prosecutors, who were then supposed to tell the defense. Right.
In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.
As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.
In one Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle was executed in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review. Boyle would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, according to a prosecutor’s memo.
[…] The Post found that while many prosecutors made swift and full disclosures, many others did so incompletely, years late or not at all. The effort was stymied at times by lack of cooperation from some prosecutors and declining interest and resources as time went on.
Overall, calls to defense lawyers indicate and records documented that prosecutors disclosed the reviews’ results to defendants in fewer than half of the 250-plus questioned cases.
As a reporter, I covered this one ongoing case where the teenager convicted of killing a shop owner during a robbery was finally released after two convicts confessed to the crime. The prosecutor still insisted the kid did the crime – in collaboration with those who confessed. Prosecutors are so famously incapable of admitting they’re wrong that I absolutely would never vote for any of them who run for higher office.
Prosecutors are so famously incapable of admitting they’re wrong that I absolutely would never vote for any of them who run for higher office.
Ditto and I would add military officers to that exclusion.
Our anointed mayor-in-waiting in San Jose is a former prosecutor.
He’s a closet teabagger masquerading as a Democrat.
There must be some ex-military officers who make decent political leaders.
Washington, Eisenhower, John Glenn?
Once you’re arrested for a serious crime in this country, you are presumed guilty. If you are indicted, you are fucked. You are obligated to PROVE your innocence. The only thing that will keep you out of jail is pure luck or outrageous incompetence by cops or the courts. Cops and prosecutors always lie. Chief prosecutors are the worst because they usually have political ambitions.
gotta keep those private prisons full!