USA Today has a new investigation out today about prosecutors in the U.S., concluding that prosecutors “have little reason to fear losing their jobs, even if they violate laws or constitutional safeguards designed to ensure the justice system is fair.”
In drawing patterns of ignored prosecutorial misconduct, the story highlights several cases throughout the United States, including the prosecution of homicide cases in D.C. That section of the investigation, titled “Trouble in Washington, D.C.,” details in part, with links to original court documents, the troubled prosecution of the Newton Street Crew in the late 1990’s:
By the early 1990s, gang violence had turned murder into an almost daily event in Washington, D.C. Unlike other parts of the country, where homicides and other violent crimes are handled by state prosecutors, the job of putting Washington’s killers in prison falls to the Justice Department. Many of the toughest cases ended up on the desk of G. Paul Howes.
In 1996, Holder, then the U.S. attorney in Washington, asked OPR to investigate Howes’ prosecution of four members of a gang known as the Newton Street Crew. The probe lasted two years. OPR concluded that Howes had improperly given tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of government witness vouchers to relatives and girlfriends of people who helped him build his case.
The Justice Department maintains that such intentional abuses are rare. But former OPR lawyers and outside investigators have said the agency overlooks some wrongdoing. One reason: Even when OPR finds that a prosecutor committed misconduct in one case, its investigators do not always look to see whether any of the prosecutor’s other cases were compromised. Griffin says it’s important that officials not “overinvestigate” prosecutors because of a single mistake, but the result is that the department can’t detect the full extent of misconduct. It didn’t in Howes’ case.
