The Council Bluffs prosecution team, while still maintaining that Harrington and McGhee are guilty, contends that even if the men were in fact framed, prosecutors, under established Supreme Court precedent, have total immunity from being sued.I like it. "No freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." Well, there is no freestanding constitutional right not to be raped, chopped into a million pieces, fed to the goldfish which are subsequently flushed down the toilet, and yet . . .
The Supreme Court has indeed said that prosecutors are immune from suit for anything they do at trial. But in this case, Harrington and McGhee maintain that before anyone being charged, prosecutors gathered evidence alongside police, interviewed witnesses and knew the testimony they were assembling was false.
The prosecutors counter that there is "no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." Stephen Sanders, the lawyer for the prosecutors, will tell the Supreme Court on Wednesday that there is no way to separate evidence gathered before trial from the trial itself. Even if a prosecutor files charges against a person knowing that there is no evidence of his guilt, says Sanders, "that's an absolutely immunized activity."
-Morning Edition
Immunizing prosecutors from lawsuits is a far more drastic and interventionary step than simply heading off most suits of this type by offering modest restitution and recompense for time served after an illegitimate conviction. Why should families be paid millions of dollars in estimated future compensation because one member died in a terrorist attack when families and individuals cannot be compensated to the tune of forgone past income for the time they spent wrongfully imprisoned?
12 comments:
how can you compare prosecutors working within the justice system to terrorists? IOZ, you're a monster.
Sending the bad people to jail is justice IOZ, its as simple as that. Stop thinking about it so much. You have a small penis.
There was a trial. The defendants lost at trial. The defendants are by definition "losers."
I'm not sure why we should care about losers. Whether the prosecutors manufactured evidence is beside the point. They won. The other people lost. Go home losers.
Sure God kills innocents, but He's also infallible. And even if He wasn't, He can kick your ass. Amen.
i see the tag and i get where you are going with this, so i proceed with caution with my earnest question -
isn't framing someone a form of fraud? couldn't framing someone be covered under fraud without as much mental gymnastics as it takes to get abortion covered under privacy? i get we are going in opposite directions there, but looord.
"Prosecutors at every level of government worry that allowing any lawsuit, ever, would provoke a flood of lawsuits, and that prosecutorial independence would be compromised..."
a gross mistatement by NPR. in lieu of "prosecutors/prosecutorial" it should read "officials/official."
"No freestanding constitutional right not to be framed."
In that case, I hope someone is working feverishly right now to frame these prosecutors.
There must be more to this, or less. You can't be fully immunized for illegal or formally unethical acts that are sins of commission not just omission. The trial setting could be sui generis, maybe, like the Senate floor, e.g., but filing and preparing cases precedes that. Tampering with witnesses and evidence? Violation of the public trust? Abuse of process? False swearing in affidavits?
Perhaps the weasel-words are "no evidence of guilt or proof of falsity" versus "evidence of not-guilt and affirmative awareness of falsity". Advertant acts versus reckless disregard? Bleech. Love that "end justifies the means"....
anon @1126
So, presumably, you would go happily to your death having been convicted on a murder charge that you knew had been cooked up by prosecutors?
If nothing else, manufacturing evidence by prosecutors should be dealt with as a contempt of court.
There's a special arrogance in a group of guys who'll destroy people for inadvertently breaking a law (either through paperwork errors, simple ignorance, a misinterpretation, or a DEA agent deciding that you've prescribed too many pills)claiming that no action they take at work should be ever be held against them, as not being able to break the law without consequence would really fuck up the flow of their day.
Really, even getting an innocent convicted without using fake evidence should bother them, as in any sensible world, it would be a mark of incompetence.
I guess I need to get a government job so that my screw-ups (and there are many) can be so easily blown off.
"Welcome to the new world order
Where the truth is always censored by corporate reporters
The government runs the drug politics on the corner
That's why I never stress rappers and their employers
I'll put a bag over his fuckin head and torture your lawyer."
oh hey I live in council bluffs. they managed to spin an expired tags ticket into what ended up costing me almost $800 and an revocation of my drivers license. It wasn't even my car!
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