Time to prosecute criminal prosecutors
Wednesday, November 29th, 2006
By Chris Fitzsimon
When North Carolina’s district attorneys cheat and lie to send people to prison or death row, they ought to be charged and tried for a serious crime.
This is not a hypothetical problem. In the past few years, death sentences have been thrown out six times because North Carolina prosecutors - who are politicians, after all - got caught withholding evidence.
In one particularly egregious case, the State Bar accused two prosecutors of withholding evidence, altering documents and lying to the court in order to send a punk named Alan Gell to death row. He was acquitted in a second trial, which was forced by Attorney General Roy Cooper.
But if Cooper was eager to re-try a man who’d already spent nine years in prison for a crime he probably didn’t commit, the attorney general was less eager to prosecute the prosecutors who apparently tried to murder him. Cooper pointed out that the local district attorney gets that honor, unless he asks the attorney general to take over. (more…)
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