Every weekday we pull together what's moving in wrongful convictions, police misconduct, and judicial accountability — and what you can do about it. Here's today's roundup. Where a story broke earlier this month rather than in the last 48 hours, we say so.
1. New report: prosecutorial misconduct has upended more than 600 death penalty cases
The biggest national story of the week is a new analysis from the Death Penalty Information Center, covered yesterday by the Davis Vanguard: more than 600 capital convictions or death sentences have been overturned, or ended in outright exoneration, because of prosecutorial misconduct. DPI's report describes misconduct ranging from withholding evidence favorable to the defense to improper argument at trial, and notes that racial disparities compound the problem (Davis Vanguard).
Put that number next to another one: since 1973, at least 202 people who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated (Death Penalty Information Center). Six hundred cases of misconduct serious enough to unravel a capital judgment is not a story about a few bad apples. It is a story about a system in which the incentive to win has consistently outrun the duty to disclose.
That duty — the constitutional obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence — is exactly what's at issue in the Camden County, New Jersey cases we work on. In Stephon Downer's case, four witnesses say he wasn't at the scene, and the man they identify as the shooter has never been charged. Suppressed evidence isn't an abstraction in a DPI spreadsheet; it's the reason a specific person is still in a cell tonight.
2. New Mexico Supreme Court explains why it removed a magistrate judge — and upholds the discipline process itself
On July 10, the New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts released the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion laying out the reasoning behind its earlier order removing McKinley County Magistrate Judge Brent Detsoi from the bench and permanently barring him from holding judicial office. The Court found Detsoi committed willful misconduct, and it rejected his challenge to the disciplinary process used against him (NM Courts release, PDF).
The procedural holding matters as much as the removal. Judges facing discipline routinely attack the machinery of the commission that investigated them. A state supreme court unanimously affirming that machinery makes the next removal easier.
3. Maryland's high court orders a judge off the bench
Within the past week, Maryland's Supreme Court issued its opinion in In the Matter of the Honorable Marc Knapp, concluding that removal was the only disposition sufficient to preserve the integrity, independence, and impartiality of the judiciary, after weighing violations of the Maryland Code of Judicial Conduct along with mitigating factors (Maryland Judiciary opinion, PDF).
Two judicial removals from two different states inside a month is unusual. Judicial conduct commissions are typically slow, confidential, and inclined toward private cautions — New York's commission, for example, has recently resolved matters through agreements in which a judge simply leaves office and promises never to seek judicial office again (NYS Commission on Judicial Conduct). Removal is the rare end of the spectrum, and it almost never happens without someone filing a complaint first.
4. Exonerations: Michigan and Philadelphia
The University of Michigan Law School's Michigan Innocence Clinic announced this month that its work helped exonerate a client, Hill, more than 22 years after a wrongful murder conviction (Michigan Law).
Earlier this year — May 26, so not fresh, but instructive — a Philadelphia judge vacated the convictions of Jermal Shuler, Marc Brittingham, and Rasheed Smith in a 1997 North Philadelphia murder after new forensic evidence discredited the expert testimony used against them (The Exoneration Project). Three men, one discredited expert, twenty-eight years.
5. The pattern underneath all of it
The recurring contributing factors — mistaken eyewitness identification, false confessions, misapplied or overstated forensic science, incentivized informants, and official misconduct by police and prosecutors — are tracked systematically by the National Registry of Exonerations, which maintains case-level data on the causes and distribution of exonerations, and by the Innocence Project's exoneration data. If you want the current national numbers rather than our summary, go to those two sources directly; both are updated continuously.
One underdiscussed thread: undisclosed police misconduct histories. South Dakota convened a task force this January precisely because failure to disclose an officer's past misconduct can be enough to overturn a conviction, even when the misconduct is decades old and unrelated to the case at hand (South Dakota Searchlight). Most states still have no reliable mechanism for getting that information to defense counsel.
That's also the shape of Richard Barge's case: the sole eyewitness has recanted, the informants have recanted, and new evidence points elsewhere. Recanting informants are one of the clearest signals the Registry data flags — and one courts are slowest to credit.
What you can do today
- File a judicial conduct complaint. New Mexico: the Judicial Standards Commission, nmjsc.org. Maryland: the Commission on Judicial Disabilities, via mdcourts.gov. New York: the Commission on Judicial Conduct, cjc.ny.gov — complaint forms are on each site, and every one of these bodies acts primarily on public complaints.
- Refer a case. The Innocence Project (innocenceproject.org), the Exoneration Project (exonerationproject.org), and the Michigan Innocence Clinic (michigan.law.umich.edu) all accept case submissions through their websites.
- New Jersey readers: the state Attorney General's Conviction Review Unit accepts applications through the Office of the Attorney General at nj.gov/oag; the Camden County Prosecutor's Office is the local decision-maker in the Downer and Barge cases.
- Sign. Both petitions linked above go directly to the offices with the power to reopen these cases.
We'll be back tomorrow.