The Supreme Court has accepted a new case from California, Van de Kamp v. Goldstein (No. 07-854), that could help define the limits of immunity that prosecutors are granted. Linda Greenhouse reports, "Justices Accept Question of Prosecutors as Lawyers and Managers."
The Supreme Court accepted an appeal on Monday that could help define the boundaries of prosecutorial immunity in an era when the officials who head big prosecutors’ offices function as managers as much as they act as hands-on lawyers.
Under longstanding legal doctrine, prosecutors are absolutely immune for their judgments in handling cases, even if a faulty judgment results in a wrongful conviction.
In this instance, a man wrongfully convicted of murder on the basis of false testimony by a jailhouse informant sued the top two officials of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office on the ground that they had failed to set up a proper management system that could have flagged the problematic nature of the informant’s testimony.
In rejecting the officials’ claim of absolute prosecutorial immunity, the federal appeals court in San Francisco held that the suit was related not to the men’s role as prosecutors, but as office managers.
The officials’ Supreme Court appeal argues that this decision circumvented a rule that has shielded prosecutors from second guessing by the courts and warns that it would “encourage a flood of lawsuits” that would make it difficult for prosecutors to do their work.
The plaintiff, Thomas L. Goldstein, served 24 years in prison before the Federal District Court in Los Angeles granted his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. In 2005 he filed a civil rights suit seeking damages from John K. Van de Kamp, who at the time of his trial in 1980 was the Los Angeles district attorney, and Curt Livesay, who was Mr. Van de Kamp’s chief deputy.
The suit said that because of inadequate record keeping, the deputy prosecutors who handled the case were unaware that their star witness, a jailhouse informant, Edward Floyd Fink, not only falsely testified that Mr. Goldstein confessed to him, but also lied when he said on the stand that he was not receiving, and had never received, any benefits for testifying on behalf of the state.
In fact, Mr. Fink had been an informant for the Long Beach for years and had in turn received reductions in his prison sentence for testifying in earlier trials, as well as in Mr. Goldstein’s case.
Prosecutors are required to inform the defense of information that could serve to impeach the credibility of prosecution witnesses, and the prosecutors would have had to turn over the information on Mr. Fink to Mr. Goldstein’s lawyers, had they known about it.
Mr. Goldstein’s suit argues that under a 1972 Supreme Court decision, Giglio v. United States, a prosecutor’s office has an affirmative obligation to maintain a record-keeping system ensuring that all lawyers in the office have access to information about promises to witnesses.
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