Now, come on . . . I know a lot of prosecutors through my husband’s work, and they’re people, too. They’re not heartless . . . . those whom I know would be sickened if they thought they’d put an innocent man behind bars, and horrified if the real guilty party went free. They take their responsibilities to the citizens of the state very seriously.
They don’t have giant, evil conspiracies to incarcerate innocent people. They live in the same cities as we do-- they don’t want the real criminasl roaming the streets with their kids. Prosecutors aren’t always judged by how many convictions they get (maybe in “big market” areas like New York) but how efficiently they do their jobs. DAs don’t want the embarassment and bad PR of a renegade prosecutor just trying to stuff the prisons. After all, their superiors read the papers, too, and they better have a damn good explanation if the shit hits the fan.
Nor does having a conviction overturned necessarily make the prosecutor “look bad” in the eyes of those who understand the system. After all, he simply did his job. He presented the case he had, not our of personal malice, but out of professional duty. If new evidence comes to light showing that the jury’s decision to send the man to prison was erroneous, it’s a tradgedy, but no one blames the prosecurot. After all, he’s not omnipotent. He went off the information he had at the time.
Professional malfeasance is another story. If they can prove that a prosecutor is guilty of actual misconduct, such as destroying evidence, tampering with witnesses and the like, his superiors will fry his ass. They won’t try to cover it up, or get in on the conspiracy. These are people, not demons. Yeah, some of them are power-hungry assholes, but you find those kinds of folk in every walk of life, and they tend to get quietly weeded out.
I reiterate that prosecutors don’t put people in prison: juries do. The prosecutor presents his evidence and argument, and the jury decides whether or not to convict.
What I think probably happened is that this prosecutor was so convinced by the evidence that he thought a DNA test was unnecessary and thus a waste of the taxpayer’s money and the court’s time. And many times it is. Inmates often file lawsuits just to slow down the legal process. (I personally know of several cases in which the inmate successfully fought a lengthy battle to get DNA tests, and the results proved that the inmate was, indeed, guilty.)
I would bet my first-born child there was no personal vendetta that the prosecutor had against this inmate. Likely, he didn’t even remember who the guy was, and had to go back and read all the case files.
When a suit is filed, the prosecutor has to reply, and the reply is usually an automatic “no.” Not because the prosecutor is mean, but because that’s his job. It’s an adversarial system, folks. We don’t reopen every case when an inmate demands it. If every single inmate demanded DNA testing in the appeals process, the justice system would be glutted with cases.
On a related note, in my state, we have recently begun compulsory DNA testing of anyone convicted of a felony. The inmates are fighting it vehemently. Lawsuits abound. The reason they are so opposed? The DNA goes into a datatbase and is matched with evidence from unsolved crimes. Dozens and dozens of convictions have resulted. I have not heard yet of a single discovery of a wrongful conviction resulting from it.
