• Law enforcement leads the way in overturning bad convictions, group says

    Reza A. Marvashti / The Free Lance-Star via AP

    Michael Wayne Hash is escorted to a police car in Culpeper, Va. on March 14, 2012. A Culpeper County Circuit Judge ordered Hash's release after his life sentence for killing an elderly woman was tossed out by a federal judge. That judge overturned Hash's 2001 murder conviction, citing prosecutorial and police misconduct and an inadequate defense.

    By Miranda Leitsinger, Staff Writer, NBC News

    The number of cases in which prosecutors or police helped exonerate people convicted of crimes surged in 2012, passing 50 percent for the first time, a research group said Wednesday.

    Authorities led or cooperated on investigations into 34 of last year’s 63 known exonerations, the group said.

    “To the extent that they are focused … on correcting errors that have been made, that’s really good news,” said Professor Sam Gross, editor of The National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the law schools at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. “That means that more innocent people will be released and that we’ll, over time, learn more about the process that produces mistakes like this and avoid more tragic errors.”

    The development may reflect the spread of what are often known as Conviction Integrity Units in district attorney’s offices in major cities across the country as well as changes in state laws making it easier to do post-conviction DNA testing, according to the registry, which launched last year and provides information about exonerations since 1989.

    Gross said it was an important change, noting that police and prosecutors are the “central actors” in the criminal justice system and had the key role of investigating crimes and pursuing justice. “They have more information; they have more power than anybody else,” said Gross.

    But Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, took exception to the report’s findings, particularly that it was the first time law enforcement helped in a majority of such cases.

    “It’s offensive because that’s our job all the time is to … hold the guilty accountable, but our job is (also) to make sure that the innocent are acquitted or exonerated,” he said. “We do that in every case.”

    He also objected to some of the exonerations, saying that in decades-old crimes being challenged today, there were bars to prosecutors re-trying these cases, such as dead witnesses or lost evidence.

    “A number of these people are not innocent,” he said. “I can’t stress this enough because you have victims out there. … If you live through that kind of stuff it’s maddening.”

    He also noted that the 1,089 exonerations found by the registry from 1989 to 2012 was a small number compared to the more than 10 million felony cases that prosecutors nationwide handle annually.

    Man held for 42 years in deadly Arizona hotel fire freed from prison

    The registry uses its own criteria to determine when someone has been exonerated, since there is no such legal category. People have been exonerated through a governor’s pardon, court dismissal of the case, acquittal on retrial and a few through court-issued “certificates of innocence” or “declarations of wrongful imprisonment.” This includes cases where DNA testing was a factor. Some people have been exonerated posthumously.

    Code snippet for US news stories:

    The 2012 exonerations included those charged with murder, including: Damon Thibodeaux, who was cleared by DNA testing in the rape and killing of his 14-year-old step cousin and was released from death row; Michael Hash, who was was freed after 12 years following his life sentence conviction in the killing of an elderly woman. A federal judge vacated the conviction, citing misconduct by the prosecutor and police, and an inadequate defense.

    The conviction integrity units, have emerged in recent years in Dallas, Houston, New York (Manhattan and Brooklyn), Santa Clara, Calif., and Lake and Cook counties in Illinois to review disputed cases. Some state attorneys general, such as in Virginia and Colorado, have also undertaken programs to facilitate exonerations or help particular defendants.

    A snapshot of the 1,050 individual exonerations from January 1989-December 2012:

    --  93.2 percent were men; 6.7 percent were women.

    --  The race of the defendants was known in 97.6 percent of the cases: 47.3 percent were black, 38.5 percent were white, 12.2 percent were Hispanic and 1.8 percent were Native American or Asian.

    --  9.4 percent pled guilty. The rest were convicted at trial: 82.2 percent by juries and 7 percent by judges. In about 1 percent of the cases, the Registry could not determine whether the trial conviction was by a jury or judge.

    --  32.4 percent were cleared at least in part through DNA evidence

    --  67.5 percent were cleared without DNA evidence.

    --  Nearly all had been in prison for years: half for at least 9 years; more than 75 percent for at least 4 years.

    Related:

    Wrongfully imprisoned for 23 years, freed man suffers heart attack a day after release

    Conviction: Reporter's 10-year quest for answers in little-known murder case

    Witness error: How mind tricks can put the innocent behind bars

  • Intruder killed while breaking into Colorado prosecutor's home

    By Keith Coffman, Reuters

    DENVER - An intruder who forced his way into the mountain home of a Colorado deputy district attorney was shot dead by either the prosecutor or her police officer husband, authorities said on Tuesday.

    The shooting, shortly before midnight Monday, comes two weeks after Colorado's prisons director was slain as he answered the front door to his home, and two days after the district attorney of Kaufman County in Texas was found shot to death with his wife.

    An assistant prosecutor in the Kaufman County district attorney's office was shot to death on January 31, and authorities have said both Texas murders and the March 19 slaying of Colorado prisons chief Tom Clements appeared to be targeted killings rather than random acts of violence.

    In light of the three previous cases, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation is leading the probe into the latest shooting, which occurred in Hot Sulphur Springs, about 95 miles northwest of Denver.

    "There are no apparent ties to recent shootings; however, investigators continue to pursue all possible leads and background information on this (dead) person," the bureau said in a written statement.


    Authorities did not immediately release the names of the deputy prosecutor and her husband in connection with Monday night's shooting.

    The deputy district attorney made a 911 emergency call and reported that a man was at her door "behaving very erratically," police said.

    The prosecutor then told dispatchers that the stranger forced his way into her home. An altercation ensued inside and shots were fired, leaving the unidentified man dead, police said.

    A spokeswoman for one of the agencies investigating the incident told Reuters that the prosecutor and her husband, himself a sheriff's deputy, both fired at the intruder, but it is too early in the probe to know who fired the fatal shot.

    The Colorado prosecutor and her husband both suffered minor injuries and have been placed on paid leave pending the results of the investigation.

    Related: For prosecutors across country, threat of violence 'comes with the job'

    Clements, the state's prisons chief, was shot to death on March 19 when he answered the front door of his home near Monument, Colorado, about 45 miles south of Denver.

    Authorities have matched the handgun used in Clements' slaying to the weapon used by a recent Colorado parolee, 28-year-old Evan Spencer Ebel, in a gun battle with police following a high-speed chase through Decatur, Texas, last month.

    Investigators have named Ebel, a member of a white supremacist prison gang, as a suspect in the killing of Clements and in the death of pizza delivery man Nathan Leon, 27, who was found dead in suburban Denver two days earlier.

    Ebel was killed in the shootout with Texas police. A search of his car turned up a pizza deliverer's shirt, visor, pizza box and heat bag.

    Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

  • For prosecutors across the country, threat of violence 'comes with the job'

    Kaufman County District Attorney's Office via AFP

    Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland.

    By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

    The murder of two Texas prosecutors is a reminder that officers of courts across the nation continually face threats that can be terrifying but are rarely carried out.

    "It comes with the job," said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association. "We all know that our jobs entail exposing ourselves to threats and risks."

    Burns, who was a prosecutor in Utah, said it would be hard to find a member of his group who has not at some point been threatened or menaced.

    Yet before Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse and DA Mike McLelland were gunned down two months apart, the NDAA had counted just 11 revenge slayings of local prosecutors since 1912.

    The U.S. Marshals Service keeps tracks of threats against federal prosecutors and judges, and the number has hovered between 1,258 and 1,394 annually for the past five years after doubling between 2003 and 2008.

    The National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys said when a threat is lodged, the Marshals Service decides on the response, which can range from a new alarm system for the prosecutor's home to a family escort to 24-hour guard outside the house.

    The group's lobbyist, Bruce Moyer, has pushed for more secure parking facilities for federal prosecutors.

    "These folks work incredible hours. During a trial it's not unusual for them to be at the office from 10:30 to 11 o'clock at night. Parking is not always in a secure location and they might have to walk several blocks in an urban area unescorted," Moyer said.


    He said other federal prosecutors have pushed to be deputized, which would allow them to carry a loaded firearm, but many requests are rejected.

    The Marshals Service would not discuss specific security measures but said in a statement that it takes "appropriate steps to provide additional protection when it is warranted."

    Personal accounts of unnamed prosecutors who had been threatened were attached to testimony the association submitted to Congress in 2007. They included:

    — A prosecutor working a case against a group called Soldiers of the Aryan Culture said the marshals "intercepted a letter which spelled out a directive to killed the 'tall, bald prosecutor who runs a lot, goes to the airport a lot, and drives a silver Honda.'" He already had a home security system after threats during a motorcycle-gang prosecution. Now a closed-circuit TV was placed on a light-pole outside his home and he was deputized.

    — A prosecutor whose children were threatened by an inmate said that after the marshals decided he was no longer in danger, he still feared for their lives. "They are now never left alone in our home," he said. His children's bus routes were changed, and he began carrying a gun.

    — A drug prosecutor said an inmate tried to hire a hitman and provided him "detailed information about my home, automobiles and family." He was deputized and trained to check his car for a possible bomb, "which I did each day for more than a year."

    Kaufman County Sheriff's Department via Reuters

    Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse.

    — A prosecutor who said a defendant in a gun case shot at him and another defendant had set his horses and dogs loose on a public roadway. "It is often unavoidably dangerous to be an AUSA and the more time spends in the position, the more danger the position entails," he said.

    When he was a county prosecutor, Burns said, there was a defendant who would follow and film him. He would get anonymous phone threats saying, "'You're a dead man.'"

    "The worst was when I would show up at a restaurant and find out the cook was someone I had put in prison and I'd already eaten the meal," he said.

    But Burns said he didn't dwell on the possibility that someone might strike out because there was little he could do to prevent it beyond responding to a specific threat.

    "It's impossible to have any security detail or system in place that would protect prosecutors 24/7," he said. "And the truth is what's happened in Texas is very rare."

    He noted that there are 40,000 city, state, county and district prosecutors in the country who handle 10 million felony-level cases a year. Many are threatened; very few are ever attacked.

    "Divorce attorneys are more likely to get shot in the head than we are," he said.

    The death of Hasse and McLelland will give his membership pause, and they may take the next poison-pen letter or anonymous call more seriously, he said. But in general, he said, they will view threats as an unpleasant part of a job they love.

    "You live with it," he said.

    Related: Texas community in shock over slaying of DA, wife

     

  • Texas assistant district attorney joins short list of slain prosecutors

    David Woo / AP

    At a news conference Thursday in Kaufman, Texas, Kaufman County Sheriff David Byrnes bows his head as District Attorney Mike McLelland answers questions about the slaying.

    AP

    Assistant district attorney Mark Hasse, 57, was shot to death Thursday in Kaufman, Texas.

    By Jon Schuppe, NBCDFW.com

    The National Prosecutor Memorial in Columbia, S.C., lists the names of 11 prosecutors who were murdered in connection to their jobs, a testament to the rarity of such attacks.

    In comparison to police officers, who suffer scores of on-duty deaths every year, prosecutors are relatively immune to deadly face-offs with criminals.

    "They're not out on the street at 2 a.m. confronting people who are intoxicated, armed and violent," said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association. "So when a prosecutor is killed, they are almost always premeditated attacks, which kind of raises the level of egregiousness."

    The next name to be added to the monument will likely be Mark Hasse, assistant district attorney in Kaufman County, Texas, who was reportedly ambushed by one or two gunmen Thursday morning outside the courthouse where he worked. Hasse was the first DA to be murdered since Sean May, an Adams County, Colo. prosecutor, was shot outside his home in 2008.

    The district attorney's association, which maintains the memorial, doesn't keep full historical records involving the killings of prosecutors; its list is almost entirely composed of murders that occurred since 1967, most of them committed by people whom the victims had put in jail or were trying to put in jail.


    The only bygone case is William Foster, whose death in an epic gun battle at the Carroll County, Va., courthouse in 1912 has been recreated on stage, in books and through generations of oral retellings.

    The list also does not include federal prosecutors. Dennis Boyd, who runs the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys, said his organization was not aware of any federal prosecutors murdered while on the job or in an attack directly linked to their work. The one possible exception is Thomas Wales, who was shot to death in his Seattle home in 2001, a crime, like May's, that has not been solved.

    But the NAAUSA's lawyer, Bruce Moyer, noted that threats against federal prosecutors have been rising in recent years. Citing data provided to him by the Department of Justice, Moyer said reported threats rose from 152 in 2005 to 208 in 2010. He could not say if any of the threats resulted in physical attacks.

    Authorities say they do not yet know why Hasse, who prosecuted dozens of criminal cases each year, was shot to death outside Dallas.

    But it seems that sometime in the near future, his name will be etched in bronze on that small monument in South Carolina.

    Such deaths "strike at the very heart of our justice system," Burns said. "The number-one duty of the government is to protect the people, and these are people who are on the front lines, along with law enforcement officers and court personnel. They go to work every day trying to protect the rest of us and bring us a sense of order via the rule of law."

    He added: "While every homicide and murder is egregious, there is something more outrageous about killing someone for being engaged in such an honorable calling."

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