THE TRUTH ABOUT JUSTICE

Over the past 15 to 20 years there has been a tremendous shift in power in
the criminal justice system from judges to prosecutors.

Prison sentences for violent crimes and drug offenses have been
substantially (sometimes drastically) lengthened, and many have been made
mandatory. Judges have little or no discretion in handing down these
sentences. More than ever before, prosecutors are able to use the threat of
these long prison terms as a club to bludgeon criminals, liars, drug addicts
and other lowlifes into providing testimony against alleged criminals. The
lowlifes cooperate in return for leniency in their own cases. Sometimes they
cooperate truthfully and help send criminals to prison. And sometimes they
lie, telling prosecutors anything they want to hear. In many of those
cases - some of which I've covered - the innocent are wrongfully convicted
and imprisoned with the guilty.

Prosecutors do much of their work in secret and there are few restraints on
their awesome power. By law, they are supposed to provide defendants with
any exculpatory evidence they uncover in the course of their investigations.
But that obligation is frequently ignored. And prosecutors are almost never
disciplined for hiding such evidence, not even when the conviction of an
innocent person is the result.

This is a system that needs to be changed.

I've written several columns about the unconscionable prosecution of an
honest New York City detective named Zaher Zahrey. Mr. Zahrey was not
convicted. In fact, he was exonerated by a jury at a federal trial, and
again by the presiding commissioner at a Police Department trial. But both
the Brooklyn district attorney and federal prosecutors tried desperately to
convict him and send him away for many years despite the fact that the
evidence in the case clearly showed that he was innocent.

It would be a mistake to think this near-miscarriage of justice was a fluke,
a rare breakdown in a system dedicated to truth and justice. The prosecution
of Detective Zahrey originated in the office of Brooklyn District Attorney
Charles Hynes. Two years ago I wrote a series of columns about a man named
Jeffrey Blake who was serving a term of 36 years to life in prison for the
murder of two men in Brooklyn in 1990. He was convicted on the word of an
alleged eyewitness, a compulsive liar who has been used repeatedly as an
informant by Mr. Hynes's office.

Jeffrey Blake was innocent. It turned out that Dana Garner, the
"eyewitness," had not even been in New York when the murders occurred.

After the columns ran, Mr. Hynes joined in a motion by Mr. Blake's lawyer, a
diligent and remarkably persistent attorney named Michelle Fox, to have the
conviction overturned. Mr. Blake was freed. The real killers have never been
caught.

Most people interested in the truth would be repelled by the likes of Dana
Garner. But Mr. Hynes's office had him testify as an eyewitness to a murder
that occurred just a week after the killings that landed Jeffrey Blake in
prison. Again Garner lied, his own mother refuting much of his account in
that case.

Last February I interviewed a man named Timothy Crosby, who also was sent to
prison following a prosecution based on a Dana Garner fantasy. His
conviction, like Jeffrey Blake's, eventually was overturned, but only after
he had spent nearly 12 years in prison. Twelve years.

This is madness. Mr. Hynes should come clean on all the cases in which
Garner's testimony sent - or helped send - people to prison. But that would
be a search for the real truth, and too often that's the last thing
prosecutors are interested in.

"All the pressure is to win, to get the so-called bad guy," said Joel Rudin,
Detective Zahrey's lawyer. "But what if the so-called bad guy turns out to
be innocent? Prosecutors are very seldom disciplined or held accountable in
any way. So there is very little real incentive to disclose exculpatory
evidence, aside from any individual or personal sense of ethics they may
have. Many have that sense of ethics. But, unfortunately, many do not."

From all over the country we are hearing about cases of prosecutorial abuse
and outright misconduct that have resulted in innocent people being
condemned to long jail sentences, or worse. It is time to take a closer look
at the officials responsible for such outrages, and begin the task of
holding them accountable.