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More From Mississippi
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008The Clarion-Ledger reports today that Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood has now officially dropped all charges against Levon Brooks, who spent more than a decade in prison for a crime another man now admits he committed. That now makes three people Allgood has convicted of murder who were later exonerated or acquitted. And he kept one of them—Kennedy Brewer—in prison an extra five years after DNA testing cleared him, because Allgood refused to let go of testimony from disgraced bite-mark "expert" Dr. Michael West.
There’s not much other news in the article, save for this:
Neither Brewer nor Brooks is getting compensation from Mississippi for the years they wrongly spent behind bars, but they can bring lawsuits.
Mississippi’s legislators will probably want to set up some sort of structured compensation system fairly quickly. I have a feeling federal jurors aren’t going to be kind to the state as these exonerations pile up, and it comes out just how ready and willing the state’s prosecutors have been to put bad expert testimony into evidence.
Ummm, Mr. Allgood, you’re REALLy bad at your job. Perhaps it’s time to go into Real Estate or Corporate Law there, chief. Not that you’d be better at that, but when you fuck up over there it doesn’t cost people *years of their lives*
That’s just a thought.
Wouldn’t it be easier to demand accountability if the state, as an institution, could not be sued except in the most egregious circumstances, for an individual employee’s actions? I think one of the reasons you have this problem is that the fate of the state is tied to its employees, but if the law protected the department, while exposing the corrupt officer, I think you might see less resistance in the future from agencies and government offices, to having their employees nailed to the wall for their abuses of power. Right now what we have is more or less collective punishment of the state for what a few employees do.