Untrustworthy Prosecutors

[Geee]

City Journal

District attorneys must disclose witnesses’ credibility problems—but what happens when they themselves aren’t telling the truth?

 

Under two Supreme Court cases, Brady v. Maryland and Giglio v. United States, prosecutors are constitutionally required to disclose to defense lawyers the credibility problems of potential prosecution witnesses, such as a history of lying or drug use. Police officers are justifiably warned that lying in any capacity can not only endanger their ability to testify but also result in termination.

Progressive prosecutors in the United States have vastly expanded this technical disclosure requirement, using Brady and Giglio to justify putting police officers on publicly available “do not use” lists—sometimes with scant justification and affording them no procedural protections. Now, these same officials are being found to lack credibility. What are the legal ramifications of a court’s calling a prosecutor a liar?

Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner, in a well-publicized example, tried to let a murderer’s death sentence be vacated. The defendant robbed and killed a couple, then left their infant daughter alone in a freezing house to die, though she was eventually rescued. At one point during the defendant’s various court proceedings, he staged a violent escape attempt from the Philadelphia courthouse. In proposing to vacate the defendant’s death sentence, Krasner’s office told a federal judge that his office had consulted with the victims’ family—the now-adult daughter whom the murderer had left to die—and that the defendant had adjusted well during his incarceration.

The federal judge held a hearing and discovered that the D.A.’s office had been untruthful. In a stinging opinion, the judge denied Krasner’s request to vacate the death sentence, noting that the surviving daughter had never been consulted and that the defendant’s escape attempt was not disclosed to the court. In a separate sanctions opinion, the judge specifically found that two prosecutors and the entire Philadelphia D.A.’s office had breached their duty of candor to the court—lied.

Krasner is not the only progressive prosecutor caught in such untruths. In Chicago, Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx has been called out for not telling the truth during the Jussie Smollett debacle. A special prosecutor—who eventually convicted Smollett for staging a fake hate-crime—identified in a report possible ethical violations by Foxx’s office regarding “false and/or misleading public statements made about the prosecution and resolution of the Initial Smollett case.” Foxx herself was identified in the report as having made “false and/or misleading” statements to the public about the evidence against Smollett when she initially decided to dismiss the case. Foxx’s response was to attack the special prosecutor and claim that, in convicting Smollett, “our justice system failed.”