This post from Unqualified Offerings says it perfectly:
In general, I agree that prosecutors should refuse to go to court with a criminal case if the case hinges on testimony from a person who cannot be trusted. This is, in general, a sound civil libertarian stance. However, one need only read Radley Balko’s blog, or the ACLU’s blog, or any number of reports on death penalty cases with shaky evidence, to recognize that this standard of credibility should not only be applied to victims of alleged sexual assaults. It should also be applied to informants (especially in death penalty cases), cops who can’t keep their stories straight, and “expert” witnesses offering testimony that is dubious at best.
So, by all means, if (for the sake of argument) DSK’s accuser is a person who cannot be trusted, and no other substantial evidence can be mustered to corroborate her allegation, drop the case. Better to let a hundred guilty people go free than send one innocent to prison. However, let’s be just as scrupulous in examining the credibility of other prosecution witnesses as well. Credibility considerations shouldn’t be exclusively for accusers in rape cases.
Logically, credibility should matter across the board. How much better would our court system be if both sides in trials had to agree on the same expert witnesses, and contribute equally to their pay, so that there would be no such thing as a paid “expert witness for the defense” or “expert witness for the prosecution.”
It would be much worse, because prosecutors could (and would) eliminate the ability of the accused to have expert testimony on their behalf, by the simple expedient of not agreeing to the defense’s choice of witness.
Robert, yeah, you’d have to work out the kinks. But the current system is certainly flawed.
I actually agree with this post 100 percent.
Take the Duke Lax case for instance. If anyone here followed it as closely as I did for a period of almost 10 months, it became quite obvious that Nifong was not the only corrupt person in Durham. If they had, say, The Innocence Project go down there and look at old cases I bet they’d find a significant portion of them, mostly occupied by poor black men, were the result of one or another kind of prosecutorial misconduct along with inadequate representation, faulty lineups, poor evidence collection and a host of other issues.
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