This article recounts an astonishing incident of prosecutorial misconduct now being defended by California's Attorney-General:
When will they ever learn? Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski declared months ago in a much-quoted opinion that there is “an epidemic of Brady violations
abroad in the land.” And yet, prosecutors continue to deny there’s a
problem. Indeed, the Department of Justice gets outright indignant at
the suggestion, and so do many state court prosecutors. They bristle at
the very mention of the possibility.
But here’s another doozy: The People (of California) v. Efrain Velasco-Palacios.
In this unpublished opinion from the Fifth Appellate District, the
California Court of Appeal reveals that state prosecutors and California
Attorney General Kamala Harris continue to be part of the problem. Kern
County prosecutor Robert Murray committed “outrageous government
misconduct.” Ms. Harris and her staff defended the
indefensible—California State prosecutor Murray flat out falsified a
transcript of a defendant’s confession.
Kern County prosecutor Robert Murray added two lines of transcript to
“evidence” that the defendant confessed to an even more egregious
offense than that with which he had been charged—the already hideous
offense of molesting a child. With the two sentences that state’s
attorney Murray perjuriously added, Murray was able to threaten charges
that carried a term of life in prison.
California Judge H.A. Staley got it right. He found that Mr. Murray’s
fabrication of “evidence”—falsifying the transcript of a confession
during discovery and plea negotiations—was “egregious, outrageous, and .
. . shocked the conscience.”
The trial judge saw no laughing matter—and neither should the rest of
us. He dismissed the indictment completely, and in a scathing opinion,
also quoted by the appellate court, wrote that the prosecutor’s actions
“diluted the protections accompanying the right to counsel and ran the
risk of fraudulently inducing defendant to enter a plea and forfeit his
right to a jury trial.” The court refused to “tolerate such outrageous
conduct that results in the depravation of basic fundamental
constitutional rights that are designed to provide basic fairness.”
When you reach a point where prosecutors commit perjury, and the highest legal official of the state defends it, we are fast approaching the point where anarchy may be preferable.
And now the molestation charges have been dropped.
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