False Evidence: Fabrication, Subornation of and Use at Trial,

My pet issue has made it to the Supreme Court:

Whether a prosecutor may be subjected to a civil trial and potential damages for a wrongful conviction and incarceration where the prosecutor allegedly violated a criminal defendant’s “substantive due process” rights by procuring false testimony during the criminal investigation, and then introduced that same testimony against the criminal defendant at trial.

The case is Pottawattamie County et al v McGhee et al. (at Scotus wiki).

Far from impairing the judicial process, prosecutors must be held accountable for bad conduct. The judicial system would benefit greatly from the credibility this lends to notions of justice contrary to the arguments presented by petitioners.

Extension of Prosecutorial Immunities

When a civil rights lawsuit claims “that a prosecutor’s management of a trial-related information system is responsible for a constitutional error at [a] particular trial, the prosecutor responsible for the system enjoys absolute immunity just as would the prosecutor who handled the particular trial itself.”

The case of Van de Kamp v. Goldstein (07-854) involved a plea to the Court to head off a civil rights damages lawsuit by a man who had been prosecuted and convicted of murder in 1980. That conviction had been based in part upon the testimony of a jailhouse informant alleging a confession to the murder.