In the spring of 2012, the guilty verdict against Lebovits was vacated because of a prosecutorial violation: two pages of Detective Litwin's notes (about Berel Ashkenazi, the defense witness) hadn't been disclosed until halfway through the trial.
On appeal in 2004, the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed Thompkins' sentence rejecting his claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, and violation of his Miranda rights.
In Marshall's view, disclosing nothing about this before the trial amounted to a Brady violation, a prosecutorial failure to share potentially exculpatory evidence with the defense.
He was convicted and sentenced to death in July 1982 in a trial riddled with constitutional violations that included judicial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, discrimination in jury selection and tampering with evidence by police to obtain a conviction.
The label "prosecutorial misconduct" is often assigned to cases involving violations of the Brady disclosure obligation because the decision on whether information is exculpatory is made initially by the prosecutor, not the judge.
Domestically, using the law itself as an instrument of oppression, prosecutorial abuses, police and prison lawlessness and entrenched procurement violations between vendors and governments are institutionalized dimensions of lawlessness.
More recently, his feud with top ICE officials is over a policy instructing deportation officers to exercise prosecutorial discretion, deporting criminals rather than immigrants whose only violation is being here illegally.
Under a policy unveiled in June by John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the agency's officers are asked to be more discriminating with its resources, using prosecutorial discretion to hasten deportations of criminals while avoiding illegal immigrants charged only with civil violations who have strong family bonds in the country.
Under the policy, immigration authorities will use powers of prosecutorial discretion in existing law to suspend the deportations of most immigrants who, although they have committed immigration violations (which generally are civil offenses), have not been convicted of crimes.
To the extent that large-scale use of prosecutorial discretion is ever appropriate, it is surely so in the case of helping people whose only violation of the law is fleeing poverty and oppression under terrible Third World governments.
Each of the cases involves charges of prosecutorial misconduct, and in particular the failure to turn over crucial evidence to the defense, a constitutional violation that defense lawyers, former prosecutors and four Supreme Court justices have said was at least at one time "pervasive" in the district attorney's office here.
