Reforming Absolute Immunity For Prosecutors and Judges
In general, criminal prosecutors and judges have absolute immunity from liability for acts conducted in the furtherance of their judicial system functions. Normally, if you feel that you have been harmed by the conduct of a prosecutor or judge in the judicial process, you appeal their rulings or collaterally attack their judgment in state or federal court (e.g. habeas corpus petitions in federal court).
There is good reason for this immunity. Both criminal prosecutors and judges are routinely grieved for alleged ethical violations by dissatisfied litigants in complaints that are almost never sustained following an investigation (usually because the complaints are “appellate in nature”), and only 1-2% of so of habeas corpus petitions (and prisoner’s petitions generally) are found to have merit.
On the other hand, there are instances in which serious misconduct by prosecutors and judges, in blatant disregard for their legal duties, results in serious harm to litigants that is not easily remedied through appeals of a conviction.
In the case of prosecutors, the most common issue is that prosecutors fail to disclose exculpatory evidence that they are constitutionally required to turn over to defense attorneys under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brady decision resulting in wrongful convictions (which are defended beyond all reason once the mistake is discovered about half the time).
While this is an ethical violation for prosecutors, in addition to a violation of a clearly established constitutional right, the proportion of cases where a Brady violation is found to have occurred in connection by an effort to vacate a criminal conviction that result in attorney regulation officials commencing cases against the prosecutors who violated the constitution in the case resulting in the wrongful incarceration is only about 1 in 1000. It is a striking example of the capture of an agency by the people who are supposed to be regulated by it.
In the case of judges, the most typical situation is for a corruption investigation to result in a criminal prosecution of a judge or a judicial ethics investigation of a judge to find wrongdoing. Not too infrequently, these cases involve improper sexual or financial relationships with prosecutors or other criminal justice system participants.
There is a very sensible compromise between absolute immunity under current law, and the qualified immunity standard that applies to police officers, that would minimize litigation of groundless and frivolous cases against prosecutors and judges from their participation in the judicial process, while allowing the most glaring cases of injustice to give rise to civil liability.
Under the compromise solution, actions against judges and prosecutors currently barred by absolute immunity would continue to be barred except in cases where there was a final judicial determination that the official had violated a rule of professional ethics in connection with the Plaintiffs’ case, or there was a final judicial determination in an underlying criminal action or collateral appeal of a criminal judgment, or in a separate criminal prosecution, that a constitutional right, ethical rule, or other legal duty of that official was committed by that official.
The cause of action would begin to accrue for statute of limitations purposes when the Plaintiff learned of, or should reasonably have discovered with reasonable diligence, the final judicial determination and all other elements of the cause of action.
Thus, individuals harmed by a judge taking bribes from a private prison operator, or having an affair with the prosecutor in a case where the individual was a party, or a prosecutor who violated someone’s Brady rights, could be sued at that point for civil rights violations and any other applicable causes of action related to the misconduct by the public official.
Such violations by judges are very rare, and cases of prosecutors being judicially determined to have committed ethical violations, crimes or to have violated Brady in a post-conviction collateral attack on a judgment, are still quite rare, and would surely become more rare if violating these constitutional rights gave rise to any reasonable possibility of civil liability for prosecutors (many of whom would probably suddenly decide that it was a good time to institute an “open file” system for the lion’s share of criminal prosecutions, implementing Brady institutionally in the way that most countries protect similar interests).
The earlier judicial determinations would often have collateral estoppel effect in the suit for civil liability, effectively establishing on day one a key element of the claim, which is the existence of wrongdoing in a case involving a Plaintiff. Not all of these decisions would have collateral estoppel effect (e.g. if the prosecutor who violated constitutional rights didn’t participate in the collateral attack on the judgment proceeding), and not all of these claims would prevail. But, this rule would identify a group of cases in which there is a very high proportion of meritorious cases, for which civil lawsuits would be allowed, while continuing to screen 99.9%+ of all cases (overwhelmingly without merit, on average) in which the absolute immunity rule would continue to apply.
The new rule, would by definition, limit civil liability to pre-established “bad apples”, whom defenders of the system constantly claim that they want to remove from the system.
It is also particularly glaring and injust for the legal system to openly and definitively after due process is had acknowledge that criminal laws, ethical rules or constitutional rights or other legal duties were violated, and yet still deny the victim of this wrongdoing any remedy, even then.
Prosecutors who have been proven to have secured wrongful convictions by violating the constitution, and judges whose corruption has been determined to have taken place in courts of law who have harmed litigants, should normatively have civil liability for their wrongdoing. It isn’t even a hard call from a moral perspective, and the systemic and bureaucratic need to screen non-meritorious cases can be easily addressed with this compromise rule.
from Wash Park Prophet http://ift.tt/1gcpkio
via Denver News