Posts tagged "mistrials"

Criminal prosecutions in the United States are loaded with rules and processes to avoid sending innocent people to prison. In many cases, however, those measures fail to prevent a wrongful conviction-often because a prosecutor's misconduct inappropriately affected the verdict.

An organization called the Northern California Innocence Project recently hosted a panel discussion after releasing its annual report on wrongful convictions. The report painted a severely unflattering picture of numerous errors and misconduct on the part of prosecutors. It found misconduct in 92 California cases, occurring at all stages of the court process. Eleven percent of the errors were severe enough to require a retrial or vacated conviction.

Previous posts have discussed the federal criminal trial of John Edwards. The former candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination was accused of violating federal campaign finance laws. Edwards used money donated to him during the campaign for the nomination to cover up an affair he had been having with a campaign videographer, and later to cover up the fact that he had had a child with his mistress.

The central question of the trial was whether those funds had been given to Edwards as gifts or whether they were meant to influence the campaign. Edwards' defense argued that the $925,000 was given by the two benefactors as gifts and would have been given regardless of the campaign as the money was meant to hide the affair from Edwards' family, rather than to keep the campaign on track. On Thursday, the trial ended in a mistrial because the jury deadlocked on five of the six complicated federal charges.

Legendary baseball pitcher Roger Clemens is asking a federal judge to dismiss the federal charges against him. Clemens faced the felony charges of perjury after allegedly lying to Congress in 2008 about whether or not he had taken performance-enhancing drugs, also known as human growth hormones, during his career.

Clemens' attorneys claim that going to trial on these charges violates his constitutional right that protects him from double jeopardy. Double jeopardy protects individuals from being charged and tried with the same crime more than once. Clemens already went to trial on the same charges back in July, but the case was dismissed when government lawyers showed information to the jurors on the case that had already been barred from the courtroom by the judge overseeing the case.

After seeing jurors in the Roger Clemens federal perjury trial exposed to inadmissible evidence, the presiding judge declared a mistrial two days into testimony.

Clemens, a former all-star pitcher, faced felony charges of making false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice in for statements he made in a federal investigation of Major League Baseball players and steroids.

In a DUI prosecution last month, jurors were able to convict on a felony drunken-driving resulting in serious bodily injury charge. However, they were asked a second question that proved much more difficult to answer. Was the defendant also guilty of murder?

The charges stemmed from a 2009 collision, which killed a 6-year-old boy and severely injured his parents. Prosecutors argued the defendant was guilty of murder in addition to DUI because he had been twice convicted of DUI in the past, and had taken two driver education courses, which made him very familiar with the risks of drunken driving.