The Center for Public Integrity

Unlike any private attorney, the local prosecutor—be he district attorney, county attorney, or criminal district attorney—is an elected official whose office is constitutionally mandated and protected. Prosecutors are still subject to the Rules of Professional Responsibility, but they must police themselves at the trial court level because of their status as independent members of the judicial branch of government. Such a holding is not tantamount to making the fox guardian of the henhouse or letting the wolf keep watch on the flock, because a prosecutor who violates ethical rules is subject to the disciplining authority of the State Bar like any other attorney. Perhaps even more importantly, as mentioned above, his violation of the rules will subject his cases to reversal on appeal when his unprofessional conduct results in a denial of due process to a defendant. Lastly, he, like all elected public officials, must regularly answer to the will of the electorate. Should his conduct create too much appearance of impropriety and public suspicion, he will ultimately answer to the voters. — State ex rel. Eidson v. Edwards, 793 S.W.2d 1 (Tx. 1990)

Prosecutors, like other attorneys, must adhere to the standards of professional conduct that exist in the state where they practice. Every state has a disciplinary system under which lawyers can be punished for violating ethical standards. Some acts of prosecutorial misconduct, apart from leading to reversals of convictions, can constitute ethical violations and thus subject the prosecutor to disciplinary action by the state bar authority.

Jennifer M. Joyce, the current elected circuit attorney in St. Louis, oversees an office whose prosecutors, the Center for Public Integrity found, were challenged at least 167 times for alleged prosecutorial misconduct before she took office. Defendants were acquitted or had their convictions reversed in 29 of those cases. About halfway through her four-year term, Joyce and her staff seem acutely aware of the challenge ahead as they try to improve the situation in their home city.

The task is a daunting one. The top person in the office has a difficult job that tends to become more difficult every decade. That is especially so in major metropolitan areas, where the top prosecutor must manage hundreds of lawyers and support staff with a budget that always seems inadequate, deal with horrific crimes almost every day, think about prevention as well as conviction, all the while balancing the obligation to serve justice with the unavoidable scrutiny of won-lost statistics that become a factor in re-election campaigns. The difficulty has grown in medium-sized and small jurisdictions as well.

Frank Conley, just retired as chief judge of Boone County, Mo., after three decades on the bench, recalled his two terms as the elected prosecuting attorney after his 1962 victory. "In a full eight years as prosecutor, I had two legitimate armed robberies," Conley said. "Now, we have an armed robbery every night. We were just a little town back then." Today, Columbia, the seat of Boone County and its dominant incorporated area, has a population of about 80,000. "Substance abuse and the transient nature of our communities today, where you're here today and gone tomorrow, all of that has contributed to a lot of the problems we've seen," Conley said. "There is no sense of community in the sense that we knew it 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. It is gloomy."

Joyce, whose office is accountable to 333,960 citizens of St. Louis, is well aware of those problems.

For the stories to go along with this project, click here to see the Harmful Error page, or here to read the Methodology behind the data.

While it is not unusual for an amicus curiae brief to be filed in a U.S. Supreme Court case, one such brief, filed on behalf of a Tennessee death row inmate, is unique both for its content and for the men who filed it. Six former Tennessee prosecutors argued, not on behalf of their state or the prosecutor, John Zimmermann, who won the conviction and death sentence against Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman, but for the defendant. The six made the pattern of behavior of Zimmermann, a prosecutor in Davidson County (Nashville), Tenn., the central issue of their brief.

The U.S. Supreme Court listened to oral arguments in the Abdur'Rahman case in November 2002. Before reaching the highest court, the murder case wound its way through Tennessee's courts during the 1980s, 1990s and into the new century. The defendant in what is arguably Zimmermann's highest-profile case ever was born James Lee Jones. He found himself on death row after being convicted by a jury of murdering a man and wounding his female companion during an armed robbery. The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1990, despite finding that Zimmermann's conduct in the case had crossed the line. In 1998, a U.S. District Court judge questioned Zimmermann's conduct in the same case, but did not give the defendant his desired result.

The American justice system is designed to err on the side of allowing the guilty to go free rather than incarcerate the innocent. But when an innocent defendant enters the criminal justice system, grievous mistakes can occur, even when prosecutors play by the rules. In some cases the prosecutor simply could not have foreseen the grievous mistake.

Gary Delsohn, a Sacramento Bee reporter, reached that conclusion after intensive research into the wrongful conviction of David Jonathan Quindt by trial prosecutor Mark Curry. Delsohn obtained special access to the Sacramento district attorney's office while researching a book, The Prosecutors: A Year in the Life of a District Attorney's Office, scheduled for publication by Dutton in August 2003. Delsohn's access gave him unique insight into the Quindt case, as well as a close look at the inner workings of a prosecutor's office.

Delsohn published an account of the Quindt case during 2002 in the quarterly magazine of the Alicia Patterson Foundation, an organization that gives financial support to journalists working on major projects. In an interview with the Center for Public Integrity, Curry said he has no quarrel with Delsohn's findings.

The crime leading to Quindt's murder conviction occurred Oct. 6, 1998, at a middle-class home in suburban Sacramento. The family living there grew high-quality marijuana, which several people knew about. Three armed men burst into the house at about 2:30 a.m., demanding the marijuana from the first occupants they saw—a 15-year-old girl who lived there and an 18-year-old male friend of her older brother. That male friend, Riley Haeling, a high school graduate working with disabled children, ended up dead, his body riddled with five bullets.