From 1976 through last year, of the 78 people sentenced to death in the state, 50 had their sentences overturned on appeal, with 15 of those for prosecutorial mistakes or misconduct.
AS Mr. Rudin noted in his filing, in 70 known cases of prosecutorial mistakes and misbehavior in Queens over about a decade, the district attorney, Richard A. Brown, has disciplined just one lawyer.
Even before Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. moved last week to throw out the conviction, the trial record was filled with instances of serious prosecutorial mistakes that dismayed the large corps of Washington lawyers who followed the case, including former prosecutors and defense lawyers.
Seven death row inmates were exonerated in Texas from 1983 to 1997 after evidence of witnesses who had lied, mistaken eyewitnesses and prosecutorial misconduct led to the discovery of their innocence.
"His conviction is contaminated by more sources of error -- prosecutorial misconduct, police misconduct, incompetent defense counsel, unprecedented prejudicial pretrial publicity, junk science, probably false confessions and mistaken eyewitness identification -- than any other case we have studied".
Any one of us could be days, hours, minutes, seconds away from wrongful conviction and execution - victims of mistaken identity by an eyewitness, prosecutorial or police misconduct, false testimony or ineffective legal defense.
All the causes of wrongful convictions are at play: mistaken identifications, false confessions, police and prosecutorial misconduct, bad lawyers, junk forensic science.
The effort to put a price on prosecutorial misconduct, errant judicial rulings and forensic lab mistakes was undertaken by the Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at UC Berkeley and the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania.
He added that the factors that led Columbia University researchers to raise questions about the death penalty in a recent study, like prosecutorial misconduct and incompetent defense counsel, "are the kinds of mistakes that could conceivably have a connection to racial attitudes in the aggregate".
