The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

Write for Us
Want your voice to be heard? Submit a letter to the editor, send us an op-ed pitch or check out our open positions for the chance to be published by the Daily Utah Chronicle.
@TheChrony
Print Issues
Write for Us
Want your voice to be heard? Submit a letter to the editor, send us an op-ed pitch or check out our open positions for the chance to be published by the Daily Utah Chronicle.
@TheChrony
Print Issues

U.S. Legal System Gives Prosecutors an Unfair Advantage

My favorite high school class, political science, rocked my world and shattered my naïve confidence in the notions of a fair trial and justice for all.

I remember learning about the “beyond a reasonable doubt standard,” a law that requires a jury not to convict a criminal if there is any doubt to his guilt. At the time, I thought, “How can the defense ever lose?” But my teacher, Mr. Richards, who is still a personal hero of mine, explained that most defense attorneys lose the majority of their cases not because most defendants are guilty, but because the game is rigged to favor the prosecution.

Prosecutors have an advantage because they have unimpeded access to all evidence. After the prosecution has evaluated the information, they are supposed to send relevant evidence to send to the opposing attorney. Of course, competitive prosecutors have incentive not to release evidence that might contradict their version of a case, even — and perhaps especially — when it has the potential to establish a defendant’s innocence.

The 1963 Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland established what is known as the Brady Rule to account for this unfair advantage. The court ruled that withholding relevant evidence violates due process and entitles a defendant to a retrial. It’s very difficult to detect Brady violations, however, because defense attorneys can’t know what has been withheld unless they get lucky and stumble upon a piece of undisclosed evidence.

In rare instances when Brady violations are exposed, they often reveal jaw-dropping prosecutorial misconduct. In a recent case out of New York, the prosecutor deliberately withheld documents that proved the innocence of a defendant charged with rape. Although he was eventually released, an innocent man spent nine months in prison and now carries the stigma of being an accused rapist, all because an aggressive prosecutor wanted to win her case. Brady violations result in the conviction of innocents on a daily basis.

Even when prosecutors do release relevant evidence to the defense, they often present it in disorganized, perplexing ways. I experienced this when I began working for Mr. Richards. One case I worked on involved a SWAT-like raid on a marijuana grower named Matthew Stewart and a shootout with police.

I’ll never forget the Herculean piles of evidence that blanketed my office space, the erroneousness of much of the information, and the rude way it was labeled. None of the audio or video evidence was uniformly formatted, and standard shenanigans included mis-attributing song titles by Journey and Blink-182 to audio files that contained important police interviews. It would have been easy to inadvertently deprive the defendant of vitally favorable evidence.

I spent hundreds of hours organizing that mess of evidence, which included a plethora irrelevant pages. I didn’t understand this until the prosecution publicly announced they were considering adding child pornography and terrorism to the list of Stewart’s charges. There was no evidence of child porn in his search history pages — they were included to impede the defense and enable prosecutors to publicly insinuate that Stewart was a pervert. As for the terrorism allegations, they were based on Halloween pictures depicting Stewart dressed as Osama Bin Laden. Though the prosecution never officially charged Stewart with these asinine allegations, floating them to the public and weighing the defense team down with bogus documents hurt Stewart’s case and image. The damage dealt by this classless ploy was likely a motivating factor in Stewart’s decision to hang himself in prison before the conclusion of his trial.

The point is that prosecutors have an unjustifiable edge over defense attorneys. Their exclusive access to evidence and their ability to selectively release or withhold it enables them to manipulate their cases and define the parameters of argumentation before the trial even begins. The distribution of justice in our country has devolved into a game for many of its participants, with the purpose being winning rather than establishing a person’s guilt or innocence. We should mitigate the influence of this legal gamification by creating a fair and equitable set of rules that establishes equal access to all the available evidence for both sides. After all, the egos of ambitious attorneys are not all that hang in the balance of these legal contests; there are human lives at stake, and we should be more cautious in gambling with them lest we cultivate a legal system that elevates victory above genuine justice.

[email protected]

Leave a Comment

Comments (0)

The Daily Utah Chronicle welcomes comments from our community. However, the Daily Utah Chronicle reserves the right to accept or deny user comments. A comment may be denied or removed if any of its content meets one or more of the following criteria: obscenity, profanity, racism, sexism, or hateful content; threats or encouragement of violent or illegal behavior; excessively long, off-topic or repetitive content; the use of threatening language or personal attacks against Chronicle members; posts violating copyright or trademark law; and advertisement or promotion of products, services, entities or individuals. Users who habitually post comments that must be removed may be blocked from commenting. In the case of duplicate or near-identical comments by the same user, only the first submission will be accepted. This includes comments posted across multiple articles. You can read more about our comment policy at https://dailyutahchronicle.com/comment-faqs/.
All The Daily Utah Chronicle Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *