What do you do when a prosecutor refuses to clear an accused person despite evidence proving their innocence? A cover story at Slate.com examines the effects of “innocence deniers,” prosecutors who aren’t just hindering justice; they’re actually working against it.
In an adversarial legal system, it’s natural to presume that prosecutors and defense attorneys are driven by the same goal: to win. They aren’t. In Berger v. United States, decided in 1935, the Supreme Court famously declared that the prosecution’s ultimate goal “is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” A prosecutor, the court wrote, “is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.”
Read more about how innocent lives are affected by prosecutors who insist that, despite the evidence to the contrary, people who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes are in fact guilty.
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