I watched the DA sway the jury to make a wrongful conviction. Are some DA's crooks?

Question

I watched the DA sway the jury to make a wrongful conviction. Are some DA's crooks?

Answer 1

"Some" of everything are crooks. No "something" is free of them.

Answer 2

I know exactly what you are saying. My experience with the DA is they will lie and be very mean just to try to win the case from them. I thought is was just one DA, but apparently they are all like that. They don't care one darn about the person standing up for themselves. They only care about winning for themselves. Luckily most judges seem to balance out all the negatives the DA produces.

Answer 3

Not just some, but most of them are. They only care about winning, even if it means putting innocents in jail.

Answer 4

I cannot reply concerning the case that you are talking about.  Which ever side wins, someone on the other side says the witnesses lied or the judge was crooked, the attorney twisted the truth, our attorney was incompetent, etc.

Answer 5

Some DAs do get blinded by ambition, but most will not jeopardize their careers to wrongfully convict an innocent person.  If the DA has exculpitory evidence, the law demands he/she disclose that information.  If caught wrongfully convicting someone, they risk being disbarred, sued, prosecuted.  Ask the guy who used to be the DA in the alleged Duke rape fiasco

Answer 6

Mike Nifong is an excellent example for this question.  The District Attorney represents the State in prosecutions, and therefore is responsible for attempting to get convictions in any legal way they can.  The problem is that there are DAs out there that will suppress or ignore exculpatory evidence, as in the infamous Duke Lacrosse case, or the child pornography prosecution case of Kelly Hoose.  In the Lacrosse case, the eyewitnesses that incriminated the accused persons told many different versions of the same story, immediately rendering their testimony insufficient for the purposes of seeking conviction.  As more evidence didn't match up or showed that the defendants were probably not guilty, such as the DNA evidence, Nifong actively prevented these pieces of evidence from making it to the defense, despite legal requirements that ALL evidence be shown to the defense during the discovery process.

In the Kelly Hoose case, the prosecution ignored the fact that the "child pornography" images in Kelly Hoose's possession on his computer were watermarked with the website for ALS Scan, a known legitimate adult production company which keeps proper 18 USC 2257 records (the ones that tell what a pornography producer must keep as evidence of models being 18 or up), and the prosecution also subpoenaed that information from ALS Scan which turned out to be 100% in compliance with 18 USC 2257 record-keeping requirements.  Hoose had to go so far as to fly one of ALS Scan's models in as a witness, to tell the court that she started with ALS Scan at 20 years of age.  After that testimony, it didn't take long before the judge dismissed the case entirely, but that case dragged on for four years before conclusion.

So yes, some DAs are indeed crooks.  There are some that are honest, but let's be frank: it's their job to put you in jail as long as possible, not to find ways to let you off the hook.  They're not motivated to let innocent people go free, they're motivated to put them in prison by the nature of the court system, so to some extent we can at least understand why some DAs are crooks.

Answer 7

DA's have forgotten that their first job is to do all they can to prove that the suspect is innocent before prosecuting him.  If not successful in proving innocence, the DA's are obligated to prosecute.  They are also obligated to produce all exculpatory evidence to the defendant.   Unfortunately, DA's make like their playing chess rather than supporting justice.  If the defendant doesn't play the game correctly, he loses.