Decent Piece on Prosecutorial Misconduct

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/prosecutorial-misconduct-new-orleans-louisiana_n_3529891.html

An excerpt from the article of local note:
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"A CULTURE OF CONVICTION

....In fact, there's a growing body of empirical data showing that the legal profession isn't really addressing prosecutorial misconduct at all.

• In 2003, the Center for Public Integrity looked at more than 11,000 cases involving misconduct since 1970. Among those, the center found a little over 2,012 instances in which an appeals court found the misconduct material to the conviction and overturned it. Less than 50 cases resulted in any professional sanction for the prosecutor.
• In 2010, USA Today published a six-month investigation of 201 cases involving misconduct by federal prosecutors. Of those, only one prosecutor "was barred even temporarily from practicing law for misconduct." The Justice Department wouldn't even tell the paper which case it was, citing concern for the prosecutor's privacy.
• A 2006 review in the Yale Law Journal concluded that "[a] prosecutor's violation of the obligation to disclose favorable evidence accounts for more miscarriages of justice than any other type of malpractice, but is rarely sanctioned by courts, and almost never by disciplinary bodies."
• An Innocence Project study of 75 DNA exonerations -- that is, cases where the defendant was later found to be unquestionably innocent -- found that prosecutorial misconduct factored into just under half of those wrongful convictions. According to a spokesman for the organization, none of the prosecutors in those cases faced any serious professional sanction.
• A 2009 study (PDF) by the Northern California Innocence Project found 707 cases in which appeals courts had found prosecutor misconduct in the state between 1997 and 2009. But of the 4,741 attorneys the state bar disciplined over that period, just 10 were prosecutors. The study also found 67 prosecutors whom appeals courts had cited for multiple infractions. Only six were ever disciplined.
• Most recently, in April, ProPublica published an investigation of 30 cases in New York City in which prosecutor misconduct had caused a conviction to be overturned. Only one prosecutor was significantly disciplined.

The 2011 Yale Law Journal survey of state disciplinary systems also found a host of problems with the way misconduct complaints against prosecutors are handled. In many states, for example, the entire disciplinary process occurs in secret, ostensibly to protect the reputation of the accused attorneys. (Nevermind that the people who were harmed by the misconduct weren't afforded the same courtesy.)
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In 2007, a California Court of Appeals found that a Tulare County deputy district attorney, Phil Cline, had improperly withheld an exculpatory audiotape of a witness interview in the murder trial of Mark Soderston. The tape was so damning to the prosecution's case, the court wrote, that "[t]his case raises the one issue that is the most feared aspect of our system -- that an innocent man might be convicted.” Unfortunately, Sodersten had had already died in prison. The court was so troubled by the case that it took the unusual step of evaluating his claim even though he was dead.
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Not only was Cline never disciplined by the state bar, he was elected district attorney in 1992 and continued to win reelection, even after the court opinion chastising him. The other prosecutor in the case, Ronald Couillard, went on to become a judge. ..."
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