November 22, 2009
Monsters in the courthouse
Radley Balko has the latest on the twenty two year long travesty of injustice that is the Bernard Baran case in Massachusetts. There were problems with the case from the very beginning, but the prosecution was hell bent for glory, and its leader is now a judge on the superior court of the state. The ongoing crime is that no one seems interested in holding Daniel Ford accountable:
In upholding the ruling that granted Baran a new trial, the appeals court added in a footnote that if the state wanted to retry him, Baran could file a motion for a hearing on Ford’s alleged misconduct. By dropping the charges, the D.A. avoided that hearing. “In my opinion,” says Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, “ the possibility of an embarrassing hearing into misconduct by a former prosecutor and now sitting Superior Court judge was the main reason, if not the reason, they decided to drop the charges. The appeals court opinion cut a bit too close to the bone for them.”
So while Bernard Baran is free after 22 years of incarceration, there are no plans to look into the actions of the prosecutor, now a sitting judge, responsible for his conviction. Ford’s career trajectory indicates the backward incentive structure that prosecutors face: Convictions produce rewards, while abuse rarely comes with a penalty.
Baran has said he isn’t sure he wants to endure a lawsuit, but even if he did, he would be unlikely to get to Ford. Prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity from civil rights lawsuits, even in cases of misconduct that lead to false convictions. They are rarely disciplined in other ways either. Courts and bar associations tend to avoid professional sanctions. A study released earlier this year by the Justice Project, a pro-defense advocacy group, concluded, “Despite the prevalence of prosecutorial misconduct all over the country, states have consistently failed to investigate or sanction prosecutors who commit acts of misconduct in order to secure convictions.”
The only way Ford’s actions in the Baran case might be examined would be for one of the state’s legal ethics boards to open an investigation, either on its own or in response to a complaint. In a September article in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, a spokesperson for the state’s Office of Bar Counsel said that of the 1,000 or so complaints the office investigates each year, just “nine or 10” involve the state’s prosecutors.
One Ford defender told the publication that it’s unfair to hold the judge accountable for something he did a quarter century ago.
Unfair. I doubt that there's anything unfair that could be done to Ford for what he did to Baran. And the current D.A., and the judges on the appeals courts, Ford's peers, the bar association, and his friends, and the unnamed "Ford defender", and many others involved in this sordid saga, are disgraces to the cause of American justice.
