The Iowa Supreme Court overturned Harrington's conviction in February, based on new evidence that prosecutors withheld police reports pointing to another suspect I am usually against more laws & regulation, but we need a new one here. The original prosecutors and all LE personnel who knew about the police reports but did not bring them up should be immediately jailed for a period of time equal to the defendant's original conviction.
Sure we should have a trial to see if they really did commit this crime, but they get to sit in jail while the trial is being conducted.
The prosecution has all the resources of the government behind it, including as much police time & manpower as they can get. Plus, when asked to produce records and evidence, the public generally cooperates with LE much more than with a defendant.
Defendant has limited resources and usually can not even gather evidence for himself because he is in jail.
Discovery is supposed to make things more even, but even if the rules are followed, it frequently does not.
In cases where the prosecution has deliberately flaunted the rules there should be a huge penalty.
Well said.
Conservatives sometimes fail to realize how important it is for rights of defendants to be respected, if we are to preserve a strong regime of law and order, and keep long sentences for career criminals and the death penalty for heinous murderers.
Soft-on-crime liberals like nothing better than -- and nothing serves their cause better than -- conservatives who don't seem to care about due process. Most of Clinton's judicial appointees are reasonably disposed in favor of law and order -- but they are uniformly susceptible to the blandishments of the legal-academic elite, and would easily vote to strike down many aspects of current criminal law policy as unconstitutional if given reason to believe that it was part of a conservative plot to disregard defendant's rights, not to protect citizens from crime. And, God help us, if the economy continues its decline and we get stuck with President Kerry in January, 2005 -- his judges will be soft-on-crime from the get-go, and together with the Clinton judges, we could see the death penalty and mandatory minimums struck down by 2009, or even sooner.