Source: http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket-part/supreme-court/the-myth-of-prosecutorial-accountability-after-connick-v.-thompson:-why-existing-professional-responsibility-measures-cannot-protect-against-prosecutorial-misconduct/
Timestamp: 2013-12-06 02:05:12
Document Index: 697863488

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 1983', '§ 1983', '§ 1983', '§ 1983', '§ 1983', '§ 1983', '§ 1983', '§ 1983']

David Keenan, Deborah Jane Cooper, David Lebowitz & Tamar Lerer,	Tuesday, 25 October 2011	[View as PDF] This Essay takes the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Connick v. Thompson as a point of departure for examining the efficacy of professional responsibility measures in combating prosecutorial misconduct. John Thompson, the plaintiff in Connick, spent fourteen years on death row because prosecutors concealed exculpatory blood evidence from his defense attorneys. In rejecting Thompson’s attempt to hold the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office civilly liable for failing to train its prosecutors in proper discovery procedures, the Connick Court substantially narrowed one of the few remaining avenues for deterring prosecutorial misconduct. Implicit in the Court’s reasoning was a belief that district attorneys' offices should be entitled to reasonably rely on professional responsibility measures to prevent prosecutorial misconduct. This Essay subjects that premise to a searching critique by surveying all fifty states’ lawyer disciplinary practices. Our study demonstrates that professional responsibility measures as they are currently composed do a poor job of policing prosecutorial misconduct. However, we also take seriously the Supreme Court’s insistence that those measures should function as the primary means of deterring misconduct. Accordingly, in addition to noting the deficiencies of professional responsibility measures, we offer a series of recommendations for enhancing their effectiveness.
After the discovery of the exculpatory evidence and his subsequent acquittal, Thompson sued Harry Connick, Sr., the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, alleging that Connick’s deliberate indifference to an obvious need to train the prosecutors in his office caused the prosecutors’ failure to turn over exculpatory evidence in Thompson’s case. It became apparent from evidence presented at trial that Connick’s office offered no formal training to its prosecutors regarding Brady evidence. Connick himself misstated Brady’s requirements in his testimony, as did the other prosecutors questioned. Connick also conceded that he stopped reading legal opinions after he came to office in 1974 and was therefore unaware of important Supreme Court rulings concerning the scope of Brady obligations. Shortly after Connick’s retirement, “a survey of assistant district attorneys in the Office revealed that more than half felt they had not received the training they needed to do their jobs.” Based on this evidence, a jury in the Eastern District of Louisiana awarded Thompson $14 million in damages. The verdict was affirmed by the Fifth Circuit, then reheard and reaffirmed by an equally divided en banc court.
Since the nineteenth century, American courts have recognized that prosecutors are immune from tort liability for actions performed in the line of duty. After decades of general adherence to this principle by state courts, the Supreme Court recognized prosecutors’ common-law tort immunity from suits for malicious prosecution in 1927, affirming per curiam a decision of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which held that “[t]he immunity is absolute, and is grounded on principles of public policy.” The purposes underlying prosecutorial immunity, as stated by the Supreme Court, are “concern that harassment by unfounded litigation would cause a deflection of the prosecutor’s energies from his public duties, and the possibility that he would shade his decisions instead of exercising the independence of judgment required by his public trust.”
While general tort liability for official misconduct by prosecutors has been regarded as unwise as a matter of policy, the specific issue of prosecutorial liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 has a more dynamic, contentious, and recent history. Congress enacted § 1983 during Reconstruction as part of an effort to permit federal courts to supervise compliance with the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly in former Confederate states. The statute creates a cause of action for damages or equitable relief against “[e]very person who, under color of” state law, “subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws.” As Justice Douglas wryly noted in his dissent from the Court’s opinion in Pierson v. Ray, in which the majority held that state judges are absolutely immune from damage suits under § 1983, “[t]o most, ‘every person’ would mean every person, not every person except judges.” Yet the Supreme Court extended Pierson’s absolute judicial immunity to state prosecutors in Imbler v. Pachtman. Despite the objections of commentators who note that § 1983’s very purpose was to provide an otherwise unavailable tort remedy for federal constitutional violations committed through the ultra vires abuse of state law power, the Court held that § 1983 “is to be read in harmony with general principles of tort immunities and defenses rather than in derogation of them.” Thus, the Court applied the longstanding policy of prosecutorial immunity to § 1983 interpretation. The Imbler Court expressly held that prosecutors are absolutely immune from § 1983 damage suits alleging Brady violations.
Municipal defendants enjoy neither absolute nor qualified immunity, and—while they cannot be sued under a respondeat superior theory—they are liable when a municipal policy or custom causes a constitutional injury. Before Connick, it appeared that municipal liability could exist where a supervising prosecutor had failed to train line prosecutors regarding their constitutional obligations. However, Connick suggests that plaintiffs will have great difficulty proving that a supervising prosecutor acted as a policymaker in failing to train subordinates—the showing necessary to obtain a remedy under § 1983. Because civil rights plaintiffs must establish that their rights were violated as a result of an official policy or custom, Connick’s holding that a failure-to-train showing can only be made by demonstrating a pattern of violations—information that might be difficult for individual plaintiffs to access—will make such suits exceedingly difficult to win. Moreover, the Court appeared to signal in Connick that a pattern of extremely similar specific violations, rather than overall misconduct, would be necessary to establish municipal liability. Thus, the class of facts potentially giving rise to municipal liability in prosecutorial misconduct cases is significantly narrowed after Connick.
Given the Supreme Court’s repeated endorsement of professional discipline as the appropriate vehicle for addressing allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, one might suppose that state bar agencies frequently sanction prosecutors. In fact, prosecutors are rarely held accountable for violating ethics rules. In 1999, Chicago Tribune reporters Maurice Possley and Ken Armstrong identified 381 homicide cases nationally in which Brady violations produced conviction reversals. Not a single prosecutor in those cases was publicly sanctioned. Four years later, a study by the Center for Public Integrity found 2012 appellate cases between 1970 and 2003 in which prosecutorial misconduct led to dismissals, sentence reductions, or reversals. Yet prosecutors faced disciplinary action in only forty-four of those cases, and seven of these actions were eventually dismissed. The most recent study indicates that depressingly little has changed since 2003, at least in California. The Northern California Innocence Project identified 707 cases between 1997 and 2009 in which courts made explicit findings of prosecutorial misconduct, 159 of which were deemed harmful. The Project’s review of the public disciplinary actions reported in the California State Bar Journal, however, revealed a mere six—out of a total of 4741—that involved prosecutorial misconduct.
Rule 3.8(e), which concerns intrusions into the lawyer-client relationship through the use of lawyer subpoenas, has only been adopted in full or modified form by thirty-two states. Since its introduction in 1990, Rule 3.8(e) has stirred substantial controversy. The Justice Department, whose attorneys’ aggressive use of the subpoena power prompted the provision in the first place, immediately expressed its disagreement with 3.8(e) by seeking court rulings exempting federal prosecutors from its reach. After the Third Circuit issued a decision endorsing the Justice Department’s position, the ABA’s House of Delegates voted to remove a clause from 3.8(e) that required prosecutors to obtain a judicial order before issuing a subpoena. Even with this amendment, many states have opted to forego the new rule.
While the ABA aspires to offer a “simple and direct procedure for making a complaint,” even this modest aim has proven elusive. Only four states, for example, offer complainants the opportunity to submit their complaints online. Most other states offer a complaint form that can be downloaded and mailed, but twelve states do not. Complainants in the latter must either file their complaints over the telephone, request that a form be mailed to them, or enter into mandatory consumer assistance programs.ASSERTION NOT HIGHLIGHTED Although no state charges a filing fee, both Kentucky and New Hampshire require complaints to be notarized.
Preferred citation: David Keenan, Deborah Jane Cooper, David Lebowitz & Tamar Lerer, The Myth of Prosecutorial Accountability After Connick v. Thompson: Why Existing Professional Responsibility Measures Cannot Protect Against Prosecutorial Misconduct, 121 Yale L.J. Online 203 (2011), http://yalelawjournal.org/2011/10/25/keenan.html.
[Editor's note - the Appendix to this Essay has not been reproduced online. It can be found in the PDF version.]