If they are not, we get a criminal justice system driven by the politics of power, following directions to imprison people that the power structure dislikes. Unlawful prosecutions are where it starts, and it goes stronger if unethical prosecutors doing illegal prosecutions go unpunished. I recently blogged about the innocent man imprisoned for years, thanks to a Brooklyn prosecutor: the man got a $10 million settlement, and the prosecutor, after taking a couple of months of taxpayer-funded vacation, resigned quietly and is living happily, with no actions taken against him.

Now Pamela Colloff has an excellent article in the Texas Monthly that makes a strong case for punishing prosecutors who misuse their powers. She writes:

On September 17, in a decisive 7–2 ruling, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the capital murder conviction of a Corpus Christi woman named Hannah Overton. Readers of Texas Monthly may recall Overton’s case, which I examined in an article a few years ago called “Hannah and Andrew,” a lengthy story that questioned the assumptions that had led to her prosecution. Overton is one of a number of defendants I have written about in recent years whose convictions have been overturned by the CCA.Michael Morton, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for the murder of his wife, and Anthony Graves, who was sent to death row in 1994 for killing six people, were exonerated after spending a collective 42 years behind bars. Although these three cases are each quite different, they share a common theme: the prosecutors who sought their indictments and secured their convictions should never have tried the cases in the first place.

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