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.
Mr. Van de Kamp and Mr. Livesay argued unsuccessfully in the lower federal courts that the suit should be dismissed on the basis of absolute prosecutorial immunity. In their Supreme Court appeal, Van de Kamp v. Goldstein, No. 07-854, they argue that “the dissemination of exculpatory information to the defense” is a “core prosecutorial function,” distinct from administrative functions like “hiring procedures and compensation schedules.” The lower courts were mistaken in viewing their failure to have a proper record-keeping system as administrative rather than prosecutorial, they maintain.
Mr. Goldstein’s lawyer argues that “entering information into and retrieving information from a data-indexing system” are “transparently administrative activities” and that no “floodgates” will open, because most prosecutors’ offices, including Los Angeles, now have the systems to avoid future mistakes.
In other actions on Monday, the justices, without comment, declined to consider whether prison sentences that run for decades without the possibility of parole violate the Constitution when applied to young children.
The case was an appeal filed on behalf of Christopher Pittman, who killed his grandparents in 2001, when he was 12. He was tried in adult court in South Carolina, convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison without the possibility of parole, the shortest possible sentence for a murder conviction in South Carolina.
According to his lawyers at the University of Texas Law School’s Supreme Court clinic, no other prison inmate in the country is serving so long a sentence for a crime committed at such a young age.
At his trial, Mr. Pittman’s defense was in part based on the fact that days earlier he had started taking an adult dose of the antidepressant Zoloft, which his lawyers maintained had led to his outburst of violence.
The role of the medication was not part of his Supreme Court appeal, Pittman v. South Carolina, No. 07-8436. Rather, his lawyers argued that the lengthy sentence amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
Three years ago, the Supreme Court interpreted the Eighth Amendment to bar the death penalty for people who committed murder as juveniles. Mr. Pittman’s appeal asked the court to apply the same analysis to extremely long sentences for young children.
On Wednesday this week, the court will hear another Eighth Amendment case, a challenge to Louisiana’s use of the death penalty for people convicted of the rape of a child.
Two inmates on the Louisiana death row are the only people in the country who are currently under a death sentence for a crime other than murder.