PROSECUTORS LASH OUT AT MISCONDUCT ALLEGATIONS

Prosecutors struck a defensive position Monday when they appeared
before a new Illinois House committee formed to explore allegations
raised by a Chicago Tribune series on prosecutorial misconduct.

In lawyerly fashion, prosecutors from Cook and DuPage Counties who
testified tried to turn the hearing into a referendum on journalistic
fairness.

Cook County State's Atty. Dick Devine and others slammed the series,
published in January, for making "greatly and unfairly exaggerated"
generalizations from what he characterized as isolated anecdotes.

"The stories that you read were built on faulty assumptions, skewed
statistics and often erroneous reporting of incidents from as much as
20 years ago," Devine testified at the Thompson Center in Chicago.

"The suggested conclusion was that ours is a profession that
encourages winning at all costs, that tolerates all forms of
misconduct, that embraces a less than total commitment to justice.
These conclusions are wrong and deeply unfair."

Mistakes happen, and prosecutors are not infallible, he added, "but
there is a huge difference between honest error and intentional
misconduct."

Of the 67,000 felony cases tried in Cook County last year, Devine
said, eight of the 2,000 post-conviction appeals were returned for
prosecutorial error, and "not a single one of those . . . involved
intentional misconduct."

Rep. James Durkin, (R-Westchester), a former Cook County prosecutor,
said the committee he chairs will present its suggestions on how to
narrow opportunities for misconduct to either the General Assembly or
the state Supreme Court.

The series detailed Tribune findings of nearly 400 cases nationwide
where prosecutors obtained homicide convictions by committing the
worst kinds of deception--hiding evidence that could have set
defendants free and allowing witnesses to lie.

In addition, the Tribune examined 20 years of criminal cases in
Illinois and found that a conviction had been set aside about once a
month because prosecutors committed misconduct. A total of 207 cases
in Cook County were set aside during those two decades.

The Tribune series detailed how prosecutors in Cook County blatantly
excluded blacks from juries, twisted the truth in their arguments and
cut secret deals with witnesses.

"It is in the nature of the culture of the prosecuting office to try
to get your guy," said Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie (D-Chicago), who told
Devine she was most troubled that misconduct appears to occur most
frequently in cases of indigent defendants. "You run for re-election
in part based on the number of scalps (you're) able to hang from
(your) belts."

Devine said his office already holds special training sessions on
avoiding prosecutorial misconduct. He also said he started changing
whatever "scalp hanging" culture might have existed by allowing
non-violent felony drug offenders to enter an education and treatment
program in lieu of prison.

"We hope to have as many as 5,000 cases go through that system, so our
narcotics numbers will be down," he said. "If we were driven simply by
numbers we would not be doing that."

The committee is likely to hear a different side of the story in
several weeks, when it takes testimony from defense attorneys.