The prosecutor should serve at least 25 years in jail for withholding key evidence and ruining this persons life. Christ these stories make me so upset. :/
Great. Now you know exactly how the jury felt when they ruined this persons life based on a complete lack of evidence that he committed a crime (never mind the withheld evidence against it).
Quoth the article: "We all felt so strongly that this was justice for Christine and that we were doing the right thing," says Mark Landrum, who was the jury foreman.
More to the point, the prosecutor is guilty, which is why he received 10 days in jail. I'm expressing that that should have been a larger punishment for the anguish he caused, and admitted to. On top of that, this time they have a stack of evidence, enough to exonerate someone, and the prosecutors actions got another person killed.
Very different circumstances, in my opinion. I do agree with your final sentence, however.
I agree that 10 days is too litte, but note that it's part of a deal which cost him his law license and highly prestigious (and paid) job as a judge. That's the real punishment.
Agreed with you there; I only hope that this continues moving forward. It's fairly unprecedented that a prosecutor would have this happen. It's not really about punishment as it is disincentive... I hope its enough to stop future Mr Moretons from having their lives ruined.
I agree with your last sentence, but I think it's a bit out of place here. The OP didn't call for a disproportionate sentence. Prosecutor Ken Anderson deliberate falsified a case that cost Mr Morton 25 years of his life. A 25 year sentence for Ken Anderson would seem perfectly reasonable to me.
The OP is calling for a disproportionate sentence. 25 years is more than many murderers get.
It seems reasonable to you because you are in fact judging this case emotionally, not reasonably. Your empathy towards the victim causes you to want revenge, believing it to be justice.
People in power over the rest of us should be held to higher standards. That should be the trade-off. As it stands, it is not the case, and there are few consequences for actions like these. That should change.
Oh, and by gunning for Mr Morton, the actual murderer went free, and killed someone else.
> Oh, and by gunning for Mr Morton, the actual murderer went free, and killed someone else.
This is something that should be told again and again and again to the juries in murder trials.
I think it's just as much a scandal that the jury convicted Morton without substantial evidence as that the prosecutor withheld potentially exonerating evidence.
> "you are in fact judging this case emotionally, not reasonably."
That's a pretty bold assumption. And it happens to be wrong in this case.
I'm not focused on the 25 years, but rather on the equivalence between the sentences. If a law were to be proposed, that the sentence for prosecutorial misconduct be comparable to the sentences so wrongfully achieved, it would have my vote regardless of the emotional context.
So basically an eye for an eye all over again. Never mind the consequences, like incentivizing prosecutors to avoid long sentences at all cost to reduce their personal risk.
I'm very much against "eye for an eye" as a general principle, but in this particular case -- in the inner workings of our judicial system -- I think it has utility.
> "Never mind the consequences, like incentivizing prosecutors to avoid long sentences..."
That is indeed part of the point! If we can agree that sentencing has spiraled out of control in this country (and I suspect we can), then perhaps a strong disincentive for misbehavior within the system would be beneficial?
Since when is it about revenge rather than education when you put people in jail? Do you really believe 10/15/20/25 years in this case would make a difference? It sounds like you're going for the eye for an eye solution here.
> "Do you really believe 10/15/20/25 years in this case would make a difference?"
And do you think 10 days in prison is going to make a difference?
To answer your question, yes, I believe serious consequences for prosecutorial misconduct will make a difference. Making the sentence for malicious prosecution comparable to the sentence suffered by the victim is simply a guideline that I personally would find reasonable.
EDIT: I should have said "I would find reasonable in this particular case, i.e., that of prosecutorial misconduct". I agree that talionic justice (eye-for-an-eye) leads to gross dysfunctional if put to general use. But I'm not convinced that makes it inappropriate in all cases.
No, but I really don't think anything over 10 years really can influence the person's behaviour. It's a 20->30, or 30->40 years jump - not only you took a lot of their life and broke most of their outside connections, but also the natural character change takes place. Holding someone for 20+ years would make them both useless to the society afterwards and unlikely to be able to live on their own.
I'll look later to see if anyone analysed this in real cases, but my intuition is that there's some limit where it doesn't make a difference anymore whether you add more years - only guarantees that the jailed person has no way to go back to any kind of reasonable life afterwards.
There appears to be no shortage of evidence that Ken Anderson is a criminal. "The State Bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline wrote in its court filing that Anderson knew of the evidence and withheld it. The filing also alleges that Anderson made a false statement to the court when he told the judge he had no evidence that could be favorable to Morton’s claims of innocence."[1]
I'm sure that those who lynched some black dude whenever a white woman was murdered in the 1900s South also often sincerely believed there was no shortage of evidence.
The problem is that people let outrage over the seriousness of the crime guide both their evaluation of evidence and demand for punishment. Their want their offended sense of justice to be assuaged, but this leads to greater and greater injustice, as people are wrongly convicted and sentences climb ever higher.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to bring race into this. I'll concede to you that some people in the South are racist. I never said otherwise. Nor have I or anyone else that I've noticed ITT suggested that lynch-mob style justice is what Ken Anderson deserves. What people have said is that Ken Anderson's crimes are serious, and deserving of more than it appears he will get. To use a prosecutor's rhetoric, a deterrent is needed.
I think what they (some people from the South) believe is that police, prosecutors, and judges are well-meaning professionals and that they conduct their duty with the intention to "do what is right" and with some degree of professionalism.
When a random citizen calls for the death penalty for some accused individual, they are always doing so with the caveat that the accused is actually guilty of the crime. They are saying "baby raping murders need to die" not necessarily that "smelly bums need to get framed up" or in the case of Morton "innocent fathers". What person (besides policemen and prosecutors) wants an innocent man convicted?
The problem is not human nature (well, maybe it is, but that's not a problem we can reliably solve). The problem is that prosecutors, judges, and cops are themselves human, and that there is little to safeguard us all from their mistakes, and even worse, they are incentive-ized to make these types of mistakes.
Yes, that happens. This is really not that case. The prosecutors actions lead to someone else getting killed. These are known facts, and not really up for debate.
More to the point, without consequences for their actions, prosecutors have an incentive to do this stuff.
Then that incentive should perhaps be removed rather than trying to add a negative incentive to prevent its abuse. There should be a better way to choose prosecutors for promotion than winning high-profile trials.
I agree with you. The problem is, that is something that will take a massive coordinated effort and systemic change, and frankly will have huge push-back by the prosecutors themselves (everyone likes easy actionable metrics)... It also assumes that all prosecutors are good, which we can never assume of everyone in a profession.
I agree; but our criminal justice system operates on the theory of deterrence. I find it particularly ironic that you speak up in defense of a prosecutor who builds a career based upon his (unjust) application of deterrence.
Aside from an interest in Justice, why would anyone defend Ken Anderson's behavior? Convicting innocent people of crimes is only in the interests of prosecutors and criminals. Conversely, every citizen is at risk from malicious wrongful prosecution.
The prosecutor got 10 days? Unless I'm reading your comment incorrectly.
The jury system cannot handle them being liable for imprisoning the wrong people, unfortunately. That's why we have all these rules in place in our legal system. The prosecutor was the one who made the decision to willingly withhold important evidence and lie to the jury to get the conviction, so I personally think he is culpable.
Oh, and by doing so, the actual killer went free, and murdered someone else. :(
A non-violent crime? Are you kidding? If you were kidnapped and imprisoned by an entity other than the State, would that be a violent crime? False imprisonment is a violent crime.
>He might have withheld evidence but in the end it's the jury who found him guilty.
You need to seriously rethink that statement. How could a jury be expected reach a correct solution when exculpatory evidence was hidden from them?
I'm curious about what percentage of incarcerated population in the US is innocent. US holds roughly 2.3 MM inmates in its prisons, that's highest rate of incarceration[1] in the world. Wondering if there is a way to put a number, or guess the percentage of innocent civilians serving jail time at any given point of time.
I'm also curious as to how many innocent americans are executed.
Given the huge number of Prisoners who have been on death row and exonerated, there must have been quite a few in the past prior to technologies like DNA testing.
Not too too many. There aren't very many executions in the US, is is losing popularity in public opinion and not practiced in all states. However, it is legal for federal crimes and military courts.
For example, New York had a death penalty in 1995 that was never used and declared unconstitutional in 2004. Since the death row has been disbanded by executive order and it is unlikely executions will ever take place in NY again.
The hope was that in recent history, far fewer people had been executed, particularly as technology, and better knowledge of what types of evidence stand up to scrutiny has improved.
I was more pondering, how many people in the past have been executed wrongly by the united states.
