And I, for one, am damn glad to see it. Rarely do you ever see a D.A. be held accountable for the laws they break. In my case I have had lawyer after lawyer tell me that they are immune from prosecution no matter what they do. I find that hard to swallow, much less believe, and luckily I am tenacious enough to keep searching for a lawyer who will tell me what I want to hear.
According to the definition of 'prosecutor', which is what D.A.'s are, their job is to 'seek justice.' That clearly wasn't done in the Duke rape case.
But, sadly, Nifong is just the tip of the iceburg. Just look at the story of Genarlow Wilson a 17-year-old black honor student and star of the football team in a small Georgia town. He received a felony conviction for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old, sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to register as a sex offender when released. He is 21 now and has spent the past two years in prison. Yesterday, a judge voided his sentence, sentenced him to a year in jail, which is less time than he has already served and said he should be release at once.
However, the Attorney General of GA filed an appeal, which means this young man, who in reality did NOTHING WRONG, will remain in prison until the appeal is heard.
There is not one good reason why this kid should have ever gone to prison or still be in prison. This is a clear cut case of prosecutorial misconduct.
There are many more cases where DNA evidence has exonorated prisoners from being the person who committed the crime they are serving time for and even with DNA evidence prosecutors fight like mad to keep innocent people in prison.
We need to come up with a way to make it easier to impose sanctions and file charges against D.A.'s for this kind of misconduct and derilection of their duties. Making the playing field more level for regular citizens to have recourse against prosecutors would go a long, long way towards reigning in these rogue prosecutors who do anything but seek justice.
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