Can Prosecutors Be Sued By People They Framed

Just a horrible tale of prosecutorial misconduct and racism.

Do prosecutors have total immunity from lawsuits for anything they do, including framing someone for murder? That is the question the justices of the Supreme Court face Wednesday.

On one side of the case being argued are Iowa prosecutors who contend “there is no freestanding right not to be framed.” They are backed by the Obama administration, 28 states and every major prosecutors organization in the country.

On the other side are two black men — Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee — men who served 25 years in prison before evidence long hidden in police files resulted in them being freed.

[Click to continue reading Can Prosecutors Be Sued By People They Framed? : NPR]

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Of course, the Roberts Supreme Court leans so far to the right, I’m surprised they even bothered to put this case on the docket.

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.”

Whatever constitutional wrongs were suffered by Harrington and McGhee, he says, they were the result of their conviction at trial, not the investigation that preceded the trial. Without the trial, he contends, Harrington and McGhee “are simply unable to point to any deprivation of liberty that they suffered from the fabrication itself.”

Not so, says Clement, the lawyer for Harrington and McGhee. The prosecutorial immunity at trial doesn’t wash back and launder a frame at the investigative stage, he says.

Clement notes that the Supreme Court has given immunity to prosecutors only after an indictment takes place. Before that, Clement contends, prosecutors have the same limited immunity that police have — namely, they can be sued if they violate clearly established constitutional rights. And in this case, he says, by the time the indictment took place, “the prosecutors were already up to their necks in this conspiracy … to frame someone for the crime they didn’t commit. That violates the Constitution any way you look at it.”

I wish Harrington and McGhee luck in their pursuit of justice, they will need it. [via]

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