re: An Unreal Dream/CNN documentary

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This kind of blatant disregard for justice happens more than we want to believe in this country. DA's are elected not for the compassion they bring to the office but rather for conviction rates.

One of the reasons I am adamantly opposed to the death sentence.

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Agree. To get a good feel for what a Prosecutor's line of thinking is, look no further than their queen-Nancy Grace. Uninformed judgement at its finest.

Well while looking into this case a bit more, I found this ridiculous bit of info about the sherriff in the Morton case...

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To his admirers, Williamson County sheriff Jim Boutwell was larger than life; to his detractors, he was a walking cliché. The amiable, slow-talking former Texas Ranger wore a white Stetson, and he took his coffee black and his Lucky Strikes unfiltered. As a young pilot for the Department of Public Safety, he was famous for having flown a single-engine airplane around the University of Texas Tower in 1966 while sniper Charles Whitman took aim at bystanders below. (Boutwell succeeded in distracting Whitman and drawing his fire as police officers moved in, though he narrowly missed being shot himself.) Law enforcement was in his blood—his great-grandfather John Champion had briefly served as the Williamson County sheriff after the Civil War—and stories were often repeated about Boutwell’s ability to win over almost anyone, even people he was about to lock up. More than once, he had defused a tense situation by simply walking up to a man wielding a gun and lifting the weapon right out of his hands. At election time, Boutwell always ran unopposed.

But Boutwell also played by his own rules, a tendency that had, in one notorious case, resulted in a botched investigation whose flawed conclusions reverberated through the cold-case files of police departments across the country. In 1983, three years before Christine’s murder, Boutwell coaxed a confession from Henry Lee Lucas, a one-eyed drifter who would, within a year’s time, be considered the most prolific serial killer in American history. Earlier that summer, Lucas had pleaded guilty to two murders—in Montague and Denton counties—and then boasted of committing at least a hundred more. At the invitation of the sheriff of Montague County, his old friend W. F. “Hound Dog” Conway, Boutwell had driven to Montague to question Lucas about an unsolved Williamson County case known as the Orange Socks murder. (The victim, who was never identified, was wearing only orange socks when her body was found in a culvert off Interstate 35 on Halloween in 1979.) After a productive initial interrogation, Boutwell brought Lucas back to Williamson County and elicited further details from him about the killing, but his methods were unethical at best. “He led Henry to the crime scene, showed him photos of the victim, and fed him information,” reporter Hugh Aynesworth, whose 1985 exposé on Lucas for the Dallas Times Herald was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, told me. “Henry didn’t even get the way he killed her right on the first try: he said Orange Socks must have been stabbed, instead of strangled. His ‘confession’ was recorded four times so it could be refined.”

Lucas, who was held at the Williamson County jail, seemed to like the attention. In subsequent interviews with Boutwell, the number of murders he claimed to have committed climbed to a staggering 360. Despite signs that Lucas was taking everyone for a ride, the Williamson County DA’s office—which had nothing but his confession to connect him to the Orange Socks killing—charged him with capital murder. Among the many problems with the state’s case was the fact that Lucas had cashed a paycheck in Jacksonville, Florida, nearly one

thousand miles away, a day after the killing. When the case went to trial, in 1984, his job foreman testified that he had seen Lucas at least three times on the day the murder occurred. (Prosecutors countered by laying out a time line that allowed Lucas to kill his victim and return to Jacksonville without a second to spare.) During a break in the trial, Boutwell speculated that jurors would see past the case’s myriad contradictions. “Even if they don’t believe Henry did this one, they know he done a lot of them, and they’ll want to see him put away for good,” Boutwell observed. Lucas was found guilty and sentenced to death.

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Haven't seen it, but was there any talk of criminal charges against the DAs

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the former DA was at this time now a district judge. He was disbarred and jailed for a period. the DA at this time when we were fighting fought us tooth and nail and was not re elected as a result.

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lsugradman

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You can do nothing but shake your head at that. It is nothing short of reprehensible that so many law enforcement officials acted in such a way for so long, that it now demeans the entire profession in the eyes of today's society.

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the idea of "conviction rates" are a comical myth perpetuated by movies and TV that only people who have no idea what they are talking about would ever even mention.

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I've watched two DA races in recent years where conviction rate was the focus of the reelection effort.

I can see I wasn't clear enough before. Of course an elected DA will have to address a conviction rate during election time.

I was referring to an ADA, who are generally the people actually trying these cases, choosing to engage in criminal behavior by falsifying or withholding evidence in preparing their case for trial. Those types of ADAs are few and far between, and any possible benefit to the office "conviction rate" would simply be outweighed by the drastic criminal and career consequences of being caught, not to mention the violation of the oath to uphold the constitution that all take.

A DA on the campaign trail talking about a parish conviction rate is not the same as the ADAs working day to day in court trying to make a living and put people who commit crimes in jail intentionally committing prosecutorial misconduct.

Sorry for any confusion.


And while you weren't one of them, there were at least five posters in this thread clearly making very clear statements about DAs in general being dirty. (As in most things, Jefferson Parish is its own animal )

If they were referring specifically to elected DAs, I won't argue because those are essentially politicians or beurocrats more than attorneys.

But I don't believe for a second that working day to day ADAs are working to "frick people over" on a daily basis like one poster suggested

I agree that most DA's are not out to screw people over. This particular case was a situation of convenience. As with anything in our daily walks of life, the bad seems to FAR outweigh the good and that get focused on more. It's just terribly sad that men such as Michael Morton end up as scapegoats and needlessly serve 25 years in prison simply because it was convenient for that DA and sheriff to prosecute.