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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Thank you for fixing the link.

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The Supreme Court effectively ruled that the prosecutors themselves are criminally liable for their actions.

The Supreme Court ruled that the DA’s office could not be held accountable for not having trained the prosecutors on this point of law because it would be standard practice for the DA’s office to assume the prosecutors should have been aware of the point of law as a result of their law school education.

If we accept this as being true and reasonable, then the Supreme Court is also ruling that it would be reasonable to assume the prosecutors did knowingly deny the defendant his legal rights. The Supreme Court decision is dependent upon a generally accepted assumption that the prosecutors are to know the law.

Since the Supreme Court is effectively ruling that the DA’s office is not responsible because the office can justifiable hold the prosecutors accountable for knowing the law, then it is reasonable to assume the prosecutors knew the law and are therefore criminally liable for their actions.

It seems the prosecutors should spend 14 years behind bars while hoping a subsequent Supreme Court ruling will hold the DA’s office accountable instead.

My only concern is that SOMEBODY needs to be held accountable in order to provide the proper checks and balances to deter it happening again in the future.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Apparently the U.S. Constitution is optional, too. But we already knew that.

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Then-New Orleans area District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. claimed his office should not be held fully responsible after one of his staff attorneys violated long-standing, accepted procedures on handling evidence in criminal trials.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Apparently the U.S. Constitution is optional, too. But we already knew that.

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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Originally posted by kaneman:

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Apparently the U.S. Constitution is optional, too. But we already knew that.

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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Of course you did...you're a liberal.

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...In the 10 years preceding Thompson's trial, Thomas acknowledges, "Louisiana courts had overturned four convictions because of Brady violations by prosecutors in Connick's office." Yet somehow this doesn't add up to a pattern of Brady violations in the office, because the evidence in those other cases wasn't blood or crime lab evidence. Huh? He then inexplicably asserts that young prosecutors needn't be trained on Brady violations because they learned everything in law school.

Scalia and Thomas are at pains to say that Connick was not aware of or responsible for his subordinates' unconstitutional conduct, except—as Ginsburg points out—that Connick acknowledged that he misunderstood Brady, acknowledged that his prosecutors "were coming fresh out of law school," acknowledged he didn't know whether they had Brady training, and acknowledged that he himself had 'stopped reading law books … and looking at opinions' when he was first elected District Attorney in 1974." And Connick also conceded that holding his underlings to the highest Brady standards would "make [his] job more difficult." As Bennett Gershman and Joel Cohen point out, the jury had "considerable evidence that both Connick and prosecutors in his office were ignorant of the constitutional rules regarding disclosure of exculpatory evidence; they were ignorant of the rules regarding disclosure of scientific evidence; there was no training, or continuing education, and no procedures to monitor compliance with evidentiary requirements; prosecutors did not review police files; and shockingly, Connick himself had been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report of the kind hidden from Thompson."

It's not just that a jury, a judge, and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Connick knew his staff was undertrained and he failed to fix it. It's that it's almost impossible, on reviewing all of the evidence, to conclude anything else. Nobody is suggesting that the legal issue here is simple or that there aren't meaningful consequences to creating liability for district attorneys who fail to train their subordinates in Brady compliance. But those aren't the opinions that Thomas and Scalia produced. Their effort instead was to sift and resift the facts until the injury done to Thompson can be pinned on a single bad actor, acting in bad faith. It's a long, sad, uphill trek....

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
So this guy was convicted of murder and sent to prison for years and years - including Death Row, where he was a month away from execution. Seems he's "owed" a murder. The system made him do the time, and now he should get to do the crime.



"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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