Report Cites Beatings, Lax Medical Care at
Cook Sheriff Calls 98 Pages of Criticism
'Unprofessional,' Defends Reform Program

By Jeff Coen, Hal Dardick and Matthew Walberg,
Chicago Tribune
July 18, 2008

David Heinzmann also contributed to this story. Cook County Jail inmate profiles by Jeff Coen, Gary Marx and Stacy St. Clair

In a scathing report released Thursday, federal authorities said that a culture exists at Cook County Jail in which inmates are systematically beaten by guards and medical care is so substandard that some inmates have died.

The Justice Department threatened legal action if steps aren't taken to ensure that inmates' basic constitutional rights aren't routinely violated.

In the 98-page report, the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division called the complex violent and pointed to a raft of problems ranging from unsanitary conditions to inadequate mental health care and suicide-prevention measures.

At a news conference, U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald called on the Cook County Board and Sheriff Tom Dart to fix a dangerous jail that is "woefully inadequate."

"Everything we've seen from them suggests they recognize what the problem is," Fitzgerald said. "Now the rubber hits the road."

Dart, who is responsible for the jail, blasted the findings, saying he felt betrayed after his office fully cooperated with the probe, only to have the report ignore their reform efforts.

"The thing that I found so disturbing was that I welcomed them in here," Dart said in an interview at his office at the West Side jail. "I gave them access to everything with the hope that they would be yet another set of eyes, that they'd come up with a couple of suggestions about how I could do things better.

"For them to come out with criticism and then flavor it with some horribly incendiary language and try to paint this picture that we don't care or we don't know is completely inaccurate and horribly unprofessional."

The largest facility of its kind in the country, the jail long has been criticized as understaffed and overcrowded. In 2004 a special Cook County grand jury condemned the handling of a 1999 mass beating of inmates by correctional officers, and inmates regularly complain to criminal court judges about their treatment there.

For more than a quarter-century, the jail has been monitored by a federal judge as a result of the settlement of a lawsuit over overcrowding. But the Justice Department report delivered to Cook County last week made it clear that oversight hasn't been enough.

The report detailed numerous incidents in which guards used excessive force in response to verbal insults, failures by inmates to follow instructions or violence against jail staff. Inmates have been punched, stomped, choked and struck with objects, often by multiple officers, suffering black eyes, broken jaws, loosened teeth, fractured noses and ribs, and head trauma, the report said.

"We believe that, despite management's efforts, a culture still exists at [the jail] in which the excessive and inappropriate use of physical force is too often tolerated," the report said.

The Justice Department faulted jail management for failing to investigate guard abuses fast and effectively.

In July 2007, a mentally ill inmate who exposed himself to a female corrections officer was taken to a clothing room where a group of guards handcuffed and beat him, leaving him with severe head injuries, the report said. In August 2006, a stabbing of a guard set off a mass beating of inmates in retaliation, an incident under federal investigation.

The report said the jail's intake area for inmates was particularly plagued with problems. In one alleged incident, guards in May 2006 beat an inmate so severely for refusing to obey orders that he needed to be taken to a trauma center and placed on a respirator.

According to the letter, the inmate was wandering around the intake area, asking for methadone, a legal drug that can be prescribed to heroin addicts. A guard told him to return to his holding pen and, when he refused, more than one guard beat him, the report said.

He was hit with a radio, and a guard smashed the inmate's dentures under his boot when they fell out of his mouth, the report said. He suffered multiple broken bones and a collapsed lung, authorities said.

No one wants guards hurt or insulted, Fitzgerald said, "but the response is not to engage in beatings of the inmates, certainly not organized beatings, and not beatings that end up with inmates being hospitalized."

Dart countered by saying incidents involving the use of force are down 22 percent so far this year, with 280 incidents between inmates and guards.

Dart said the federal review ignored reforms he enacted in how his office investigates misconduct at the jail and made no mention that he formed a blue-ribbon panel of prosecutors to revamp the internal affairs process. He hired a high-ranking FBI agent to lead that program.

The sheriff acknowledged that there has been abuse of inmates by correctional officers but said the new Office of Professional Regulations aggressively investigates allegations. When they are substantiated, suspensions and terminations are recommended, he said.

Federal investigators, who visited the jail in summer 2007, found overall security lacking, enabling inmates to easily harm one other because of staffing woes. Two inmates were killed by other inmates in 2006, the report said, and the facility endured 35 fights during just one week in March 2007.

The report also found that medical services at the jail fell below constitutionally required standards of care in more than a dozen areas, including in staffing and emergency care. Some inmates died needlessly as a result, the Justice Department concluded.

In early 2006, a female inmate died of an untreated infection that was a common complication of HIV, investigators found. She went untreated for weeks despite an abnormal X-ray that identified a problem, the report said.

In an August 2006 case, an inmate's leg was amputated because of a bone infection improperly treated at the jail. In late 2006, another inmate died of sepsis after a jail staffer failed to take him to an appointment for post-operative care for a gunshot wound, the report said.

David Fagus, chief operating officer of Cermak Health Services, the jail hospital, pointed out that Cermak's budget was cut to about $31 million in 2007 from $40 million in 2006. Currently, Cermak has 394 employees, about 70 fewer than in 2006, budget documents show.

Cook County Board President Todd Stroger said his administration has taken steps in the last year that the report didn't address.

"Since the Department of Justice's site visit, steps have been taken to enhance security for the staff, inmates and public," Stroger said.

In recent years, funding for the jail has steadily increased. The budget for fiscal 2008 rose to nearly $215 million from about $198 million last year.

Federal officials said they recognize Cook County's budget constraints. Fitzgerald told reporters that no one should be under any illusions that the fixes won't cost money. Yet financial woes won't be accepted as an excuse for not working to solve the problems, he said.

"It can't be the only county in the country that can't afford to have a jail that satisfies constitutional standards," Fitzgerald said.

- - -

Donald Martin, 26: Attacked by guards

Donald Martin Jr., 26, an aspiring hip-hop artist from the South Side, had been in the jail for several months before a run-in with guards in March 2006.

Martin was tapping on the wall of a holding cell. A guard ordered him to stop, and when Martin turned to look at him, the guard cursed and called Martin and other inmates criminals. Martin, the son of a retired police officer, reminded the guard he was a pretrial detainee, innocent in the eyes of the law.

Three officers threw Martin against a wall, and soon a swarm of guards was punching and kicking him.

He said a guard dragged him down a hallway by his hair "like a caveman would drag his girlfriend."

"I remember thinking, 'I'm going to die in jail,'" Martin said.

His attorney, Neil Toppel, said Martin suffered black eyes and bruises.

Martin was awaiting trial on attempted murder charges, which were dropped. He said he pleaded guilty to vehicular invasion just so he could go home. Martin sued in federal court. On Thursday -- the day his case was part of the federal report on the jail -- a jury awarded him $750,000 in damages.

-- Jeff Coen

- - -

John Lambert, 25: Beaten to death

John Lambert, 25, died in July 2007, more than a week after he was found unresponsive in his locked cell at Cook County Jail. Lambert's case was cited in the federal report released Thursday.

Jeff Wilson, an attorney who has sued the county on behalf of the Lambert family, alleges that Lambert's cellmate had a history of violence toward other inmates and beat Lambert. When jail employees found Lambert on the floor about 3:10 a.m., it took nearly 90 minutes to get him to a hospital. Cook County Department of Corrections paramedics never treated Lambert, the suit says. Lambert died of head injuries.

The county had no comment Thursday on the death, but Wilson did.

"In my client's case," he said, "it was a death sentence to put him in the Cook County Jail."

-- Gary Marx

- - -

Nicholas Grossi, 25: Suicide in cell

Nicholas Grossi, 25, had a little over a week left in Cook County Jail when he fastened his bed sheet to the top bunk and tied the other end around his neck. The Addison man, who had pleaded guilty to drug charges just three days before, then sat on the floor, obstructing his airway and taking his own life.

The New Year's Day suicide was the first of three so far this year. All three drew criticism in the federal report for the delay between the time the inmates were discovered and the removal of the nooses. In Grossi's case, the report states that 6 minutes elapsed between when the guard found him and when paramedics severed the noose with a key.

Court documents filed by his family in anticipation of a lawsuit against the county say Grossi began his 2-week jail sentence with a prescription for mood-stabilizing drugs, but he was not allowed to take the pills while in custody. His parents' attorney has raised doubts about whether authorities administered an alternative medication during his incarceration or provided him with psychiatric care.

Otherwise, attorney Lonny Ben Ogus said, the family cannot explain why a young man with a job and a fiance waiting for him would commit suicide with just 11 days left in his sentence.

"They expected him to come out alive and hopefully be a better person," Ogus said.

The county had no comment Thursday on the case.

-- Stacy St. Clair

US Prison Population Dwarfs That of Other Nations

By Adam Liptak
International Herald Tribune
April 23, 2008

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes ? from writing bad checks to using drugs ? that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges - many of whom are elected, another American anomaly - yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

"In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in "Democracy in America."

No more.

"Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons."

Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The Handbook of Crime and Punishment."

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach."

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation's relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

"The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different," said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. "But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it's much higher."

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. "The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism," said Stern of King's College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them "are among the most serious and violent offenders."

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation's prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.

"Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are," Tonry wrote last year in "Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective."

"It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries," Tonry wrote. "Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential."

The American character - self-reliant, independent, judgmental - also plays a role.

"America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility," Whitman of Yale wrote. "That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years."

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have "comparatively mild penal policies," Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.

"Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas," said Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America's exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

"As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized" thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

"These figures," Cassell wrote, "should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate."

Other commentators were more definitive. "The simple truth is that imprisonment works," wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. "Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs."

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. "Rises and falls in Canada's crime rate have closely paralleled America's for 40 years," Tonry wrote last year. "But its imprisonment rate has remained stable."

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville's work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America's booming prison population.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy - just what Tocqueville was talking about," he said. "We have a highly politicized criminal justice system."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/23/america/23prison.php

Seven Million in U.S. Jails, on Probation or Parole

By Kasie Hunt
The Associated Press
New York Lawyer
November 30, 2006

At the overcrowded California Institution for Men, the gymnasium is used for bunks. (Monica Almeida/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON -- A record 7 million people -- or one in every 32 American adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.

More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.

Men still far outnumber women in prisons and jails, but the female population is growing faster. Over the past year, the female population in state or federal prison increased 2.6 percent while the number of male inmates rose 1.9 percent. By year's end, 7 percent of all inmates were women. The gender figures do not include inmates in local jails.

"Today's figures fail to capture incarceration's impact on the thousands of children left behind by mothers in prison," Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group supporting criminal justice reform, said in a statement. "Misguided policies that create harsher sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of women in prisons and jails."

From 1995 to 2003, inmates in federal prison for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.

The numbers are from the annual report from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The report breaks down inmate populations for state and federal prisons and local jails.

Racial disparities among prisoners persist. In the 25-29 age group, 8.1 percent of black men -- about one in 13 -- are incarcerated, compared with 2.6 percent of Hispanic men and 1.1 percent of white men. And it's not much different among women. By the end of 2005, black women were more than twice as likely as Hispanics and over three times as likely as white women to be in prison.

Certain states saw more significant changes in prison population. In South Dakota, the number of inmates increased 11 percent over the past year, more than any other state. Montana and Kentucky were next in line with increases of 10.4 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively. Georgia had the biggest decrease, losing 4.6 percent, followed by Maryland with a 2.4 percent decrease and Louisiana with a 2.3 percent drop.

Justice Still Denied
The State Has Failed to Launch a Probe
of the Wilton Dedge Case for Far Too Long

Florida Today
Nov 22, 2004

More than three months ago, Brevard County resident Wilton Dedge was released from prison after serving 22 years for a rape DNA evidence has proven he didn't commit.

The prosecution of Dedge -- partly handled by the Seminole-Brevard State Attorney's office -- was rife with questionable practices.

Those included use of dubious dog-sniffing evidence, reliance on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch whose integrity was heavily compromised, and blatant stalling tactics while Dedge's right to freedom funneled through the hour glass.

That led FLORIDA TODAY -- along with other state newspapers -- to repeatedly call on Gov. Jeb Bush and the State Attorney General Charlie Crist to sponsor an investigation into possible prosecutorial misconduct in the case.

The silence has been deafening.

The attorney general's office says the governor's office must instigate such an investigation. The governor's office says it's up to the attorney general.

State Attorney Norm Wolfinger was involved in efforts to keep Dedge behind bars despite mounting evidence of his innocence. Wolfinger's response to the gross miscarriage of justice served up to Dedge can be summed up as: Whoops, but we're not really responsible.

We smell a whitewash. And we're not alone.

The Innocence Project -- a nonprofit group that works to reduce the number of wrongful convictions in America's courts through DNA testing -- took on Dedge's case and worked relentlessly for years to effect his release.

Having met with a similar stonewall from Florida officials on opening an investigation into prosecutorial actions that doomed Dedge to spend two decades behind bars, they're now focusing primarily on getting him economic restitution through the Legislature.

"That's most urgent, but we hope they will also take up the issue of making sure this doesn't happen again," says Nina Morrison, staff attorney for the Innocence Project.

Fortunately, they're now flanked in that effort by Sandy D'Alemberte, who has served as Florida State University president, dean of the FSU Law School and president of the American Bar Association, and by lobbyist Guy Spearman, who until recently represented the interests of Brevard County government in Tallahassee.

We commend them for voluntarily stepping forward to right the profound injustice done to Dedge, by working on a special-claims bill in his behalf.

And we charge Brevard's legislative delegates to lead the way in speeding that bill to passage, making sure it includes both funds to make up for lost wages and a reasonable amount to offset -- however inadequately -- the immense, intangible losses Dedge has suffered.

It's not impossible to do, as the award this fall of $800,000 to a Tennessee man also wrongly convicted of rape shows.

But monetary compensation is still not enough.

Next D'Alemberte and Spearman -- perhaps in conjunction with the Florida Bar Association -- should promote an independent investigation into judicial failure in the Dedge case.

That might at last shame state officials out of their silence.

ABA Calls for End to Mandatory Minimum Prison Terms
Rules Don't Necessarily Make Nation Safer, Lawyers' Group Says

By Anne Gearan
Associated Press
June 23, 2004

WASHINGTON - Many get-tough approaches to crime don't work and some, such as mandatory minimum sentences for small-time drug offenders, are unfair and should be abolished, a report from the American Bar Association said Wednesday.

State and federal laws requiring mandatory minimum prison terms leave little room to consider differences among crimes and criminals, a commission studying problems in the criminal justice system found.

More people are behind bars for longer terms, but it is unclear whether the country is safer as a result, the ABA said.

Long prison terms should be reserved for criminals who pose the greatest danger to society and who commit the most serious crimes, the report said. States and the federal government should find alternatives to prison terms such as drug treatment for many less serious crimes.

"The costs of the American experiment in mass incarceration have been high," the report said.

It said states and the federal government spent $9 billion on jails and prisons in 1982 and $49 billion in 1999, an increase of more than 400 percent.

The likelihood that someone living in the United States will go to prison during his or her lifetime more than tripled to 6.6 percent between 1974 and 2001, the report added.

The report, nearly a year in the making, follows up on blunt criticism of the criminal justice system that came from an unlikely quarter last year. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a moderate conservative placed on the court by President Reagan, asked the nation's largest lawyers' group to look at what he called unfair and even immoral practices throughout the criminal justice system.

The ABA responded with a lengthy study and recommendations for changes in sentencing laws and in other areas. In the case of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, state legislatures and Congress would have to pass new legislation to repeal the existing laws.

The ABA, the nation's largest lawyers' group with more than 400,000 members, will vote in August on whether to adopt the recommendations as official positions of the organization. The ABA's policies are not law, but are influential.

"For more than 20 years, we have gotten tougher on crime," said ABA President Dennis Archer. "Now we need to get smarter."

The ABA report also urged governors and the president to pardon more deserving prisoners, and recommended stronger efforts to reduce racial disparities in sentencing and in the prison population.

Based on current trends, a black male born in 2001 has a one in three chance of being imprisoned during his lifetime, compared with a one in six chance for a Latino male and one in 17 for a white male, the report noted.

An end to mandatory minimum prison terms is among the report's most specific recommendations, and probably one of the hardest to achieve.

Mandatory minimum sentences have proliferated over the past two decades, and are often politically popular. They often respond to a specific new threat or phenomenon, such as the spread of crack cocaine in the 1980s.

In 1986, Congress required certain long federal prison terms for possession of crack that were longer than sentences for the powder form of the drug. For example, possession of just five grams of crack yields a mandatory prison term of at least five years.

Addressing the ABA last summer, Kennedy pointed to what he called overly harsh prison terms for nonviolent drug offenders, and specifically denounced mandatory minimum sentences.

"Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long," Kennedy said then.

To Read the whole report click on webpage below:
http://www.manningmedia.net/Clients/ABA/ABA288/index.htm

Study Suspects Thousands Of False Convictions

By Adam Liptak
The New York Times
April 19, 2004

A comprehensive study of 328 criminal cases over the last 15 years in which the convicted person was exonerated suggests that there are thousands of innocent people in prison today.

Almost all the exonerations were in murder and rape cases, and that implies, according to the study, that many innocent people have been convicted of less serious crimes. But the study says they benefited neither from the intense scrutiny that murder cases tend to receive nor from the DNA evidence that can categorically establish the innocence of people convicted of rape.

Prosecutors, however, have questioned some of the methodology used in the study, which was prepared at the University of Michigan and supervised by a law professor there, Samuel R. Gross. They say the number of exonerations is quite small when compared with the number of convictions during the 15-year period. About 2 million people are in American prisons and jails.

The study identified 199 murder exonerations, 73 of them in capital cases. It also found 120 rape exonerations. Only nine cases involved other crimes. In more than half of the cases, the defendants had been in prison for more than 10 years.

The study's authors said they picked 1989 as a starting point because it was the year of the first DNA exoneration. Of the 328 exonerations they found in the intervening years, 145 involved DNA evidence.

In 88 percent of the rape cases in the study, DNA evidence helped free the inmate. But biological evidence is far less likely to be available or provide definitive proof in other kinds of cases. Only 20 percent of the murder exonerations involved DNA evidence, and almost all of those were rape-murders.

The study, which will be presented Friday at a conference of defense lawyers in Austin, Tex., also found that very different factors contributed to wrongful convictions in rape and murder cases.

Some 90 percent of false convictions in the rape cases involved misidentification by witnesses, very often across races. In particular, the study said black men made up a disproportionate number of exonerated rape defendants.

The racial mix of those exonerated, in general, mirrored that of the prison population, and the mix of those exonerated of murder mirrored the mix of those convicted of murder. But while 29 percent of those in prison for rape are black, 65 percent of those exonerated of the crime are.

Interracial rapes are, moreover, uncommon. Rapes of white women by black men, for instance, represent less than 10 percent of rapes, according to the Justice Department. But in half of the rape exonerations where racial data was available, black men were falsely convicted of raping white women.

"The most obvious explanation for this racial disparity is probably also the most powerful," the study says. "White Americans are much more likely to mistake one black person for another than to do the same for members of their own race."

On the other hand, the study found that the leading causes of wrongful convictions for murder were false confessions and perjury by codefendants, informants, police officers or forensic scientists.

A separate study considering 125 cases involving false confessions was published in the North Carolina Law Review last month and found that such confessions were most common among groups vulnerable to suggestion and intimidation.

"There are three groups of people most likely to confess," said Steven A. Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern, who conducted the study with Richard A. Leo, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine. "They are the mentally retarded, the mentally ill and juveniles."

Professor Drizin, too, said false confessions were most common in murder cases.

"Those are the cases where there is the greatest pressure to obtain confessions," he said, "and confessions are often the only way to solve those crimes."

Professor Drizin said that videotaping of police interrogations would cut down on false confessions.

The authors of the Michigan study offered dueling rationales for the murder exonerations, and both reasons, they said, were disturbing.

There may be more murder exonerations, they said, because the cases attract more attention, especially when a death sentence is imposed. Death row inmates represent a quarter of 1 percent of the prison population but 22 percent of the exonerated.

That suggests that innocent people are often convicted in run-of-the-mill cases. Indeed, the study says, "if we reviewed prison sentences with the same level of care that we devote to death sentences, there would have been more than 28,500 non-death-row exonerations in the past 15 years rather than the 255 that have in fact occurred."

The study offered a competing theory, as well. Mistakes, it said, may be more likely in murder cases and far more likely in capital cases.

"The truth," the study concludes, "is clearly a combination of these two appalling possibilities."

Critics of the Michigan study questioned its methodology, saying it overstated the number of authentically innocent people. The study calls every nullification of a conviction by a governor, court or prosecutor declaring a person not guilty of a crime an exoneration.

In Astoria, Ore., Joshua Marquis, the district attorney for Clatsop County, said many of the

people exonerated under the study's definition may nonetheless have committed the crimes in question, though the evidence may have become too weak to prove that beyond a reasonably doubt.

"The real number of people on death row exonerated in the sense of being actually innocent in the modern era of the death penalty is about 25 to 30," Mr. Marquis said. The Michigan study put the number at 73.

He added that even the error rate suggested by the study was tolerable given the American prison population.

"We all agree that it is better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be convicted," Mr. Marquis said. "Is it better for 100,000 guilty men to walk free rather than have one innocent man convicted? The cost-benefit policy answer is no."

At the University of Michigan, Professor Gross said that was the wrong calculus.

"No rate of preventable errors that destroy people's lives and destroy the lives of those close to them is acceptable," he said.

Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project, said Mr. Marquis's analysis ignored another point.

"Every time an innocent person is convicted," Mr. Scheck said, "it means there are more guilty people out there who are still committing crimes."

Trading in Lies, Some Informers Build Cases for Prosecutors

By William Glaberson
The New York Times
April 7, 2004

When a federal judge in Brooklyn overturned the gang-murder conviction of a Red Hook man in February because of perjury by government witnesses, he provided a rare glimpse of the murky world of prosecutors and their criminal informers. In exchange for information, prosecutors routinely offer leniency to killers, thieves and liars.

Tomorrow, the judge, John Gleeson, is to sentence the three men he labeled perjurers, and a fuller picture of that world of law enforcement compromises is emerging. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn say they still believe the man whose conviction was overturned was a killer. But they acknowledge a host of lies by their witnesses, and they paint a dark portrait of informers' predatory ways.

One of their three main witnesses in the gang case, the prosecutors acknowledged, "has lied and persists in lying." Another perjured himself "to minimize his own culpability." The prosecutors have renounced leniency agreements they offered to two of the three for crimes they admitted; the third is to plead guilty to perjury when he is sentenced for his role in the killing.

Lawyers not involved in the case in Federal District Court say it has drawn wide notice because it shows how cooperating witnesses trying to protect themselves sometimes build cases for prosecutors. Faced with rigid federal sentencing rules, more criminals than ever are streaming to prosecutors seeking leniency for their own crimes in exchange for testimony, defense lawyers say.

Some prosecutors resist admitting that their cooperating witnesses are telling them what they want to hear, said Diarmuid White, a veteran New York defense lawyer. Because prosecutors influence the judges who in turn sentence cooperating witnesses, Mr. White said that for many of these witnesses: "Truth is not important. Getting a conviction is important.''

Prosecutors often tell jurors that using cooperating witnesses is an unsavory but necessary part of the system. Jonathan S. Sack, a Manhattan lawyer and former chief of the criminal division at the United States attorney's office in Brooklyn, said cooperators are vital in organized crime and gang cases. "In order to understand the inner workings of criminal groups,'' he said, "you need to get people on the inside.''

Pamela K. Chen, the prosecutor in the Brooklyn gang case, has not acknowledged any wrongdoing in winning the conviction Judge Gleeson overturned, against the Red Hook man, Angel M. DeAngelo. In filings, she said an investigation after the jury's guilty verdict last April showed that her witnesses did lie about several issues, like who obtained the gun used in the shooting.

But she argued that the witnesses told the truth when they identified Mr. DeAngelo as the man who fired the deadly shot in a 1999 confrontation between members of two Brooklyn street gangs, the Hard Pack and the Luquer Street Boys. Mr. DeAngelo, now 31, was not a gang member.

Ms. Chen also noted that the witnesses who Judge Gleeson had concluded testified falsely had actually passed lie-detector tests when asked after the trial if Mr. DeAngelo had committed the murder. Mr. DeAngelo's history, she said, included slashing a police officer and puncturing his throat.

But her filing also acknowledged tangled lies by her witnesses. One, Alberto Alvarado, failed to disclose that he had ordered the shooting, she wrote. Judge Gleeson's February decision suggested that Mr. Alvarado and the two other witnesses were responsible for the killing and worked together to convict Mr. DeAngelo. One of the witnesses was Mr. Alvarado's younger brother Robert, 19 at the time.

The prosecution's filings described the dangerous territory inhabited by defendants, who can be the prey of potential cooperators looking for a good deal.

According to the prosecutors, the third cooperator in the gang case, Edward Maggiore, confided in at least seven inmates while he awaited Mr. DeAngelo's trial in jail. He told most of them, the prosecutors now say, that someone other than Mr. DeAngelo was the killer.

But the prosecutors say some of those seven jailhouse informers, too, are liars who may have been out to get cooperation deals themselves. The prosecutors described scenes in which one imprisoned criminal enlisted another to trap a third in lies as they competed to win the favor of prosecutors. The prosecutors say some of the seven inmates they interviewed many have been setting up Mr. Maggiore in the hope of getting favorable treatment in their own cases.

The prosecutors said one inmate had another "pump Maggiore for information." That inmate had cooperated with prosecutors in other cases and, the prosecutors said, sensed that the gang case presented opportunities for informers.

In the federal witness box, cooperators often appear as engaging partners of law enforcement officials. But the filings provided a hint of behind-the-scenes struggles that sometimes erupt between prosecutors and their witnesses. The prosecutors said they once nearly revoked Mr. Maggiore's leniency deal because of threats he was sending out of jail that terrorized his girlfriend.

For the cooperating witnesses, the consequences of disappointing prosecutors can be devastating.

Mr. Maggiore could now face life in prison. The other two cooperating witnesses could face sentences of 30 years or more.

Because of the stakes, the defense lawyers have asked Judge Gleeson to force the prosecutors to honor their promises of leniency. They have also asked him to disqualify himself from sentencing the three witnesses because he has already indicated he was distressed by their perjury.

Judges rarely recuse themselves merely because they have formed opinions based on what they learned during a trial. Still, the defense lawyers said Judge Gleeson, a former federal prosecutor, did not make any secret of how troubled he was.

From the bench at one point, Judge Gleeson said he could not understand why the prosecutors were unwilling to acknowledge the weakness their witnesses' lies exposed in their case.

"I am shaking up here,'' Judge Gleeson said. "I feel sick with this case. This case reeks.''

Prosecutor Misconduct In Two Recent High-Profile Cases:
Why It Happens, and How We Can Better Prevent It

By Elaine Cassel
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2004
Find Law’s Legal Commentary

Federal prosecutorial misconduct has turned two recent high profile cases -- one involving allegations of murder, the other involving allegations of a terrorist conspiracy -- upside down.

In each case, the jury came back with a conviction, or convictions. But in one case, the jury saw evidence it wasn't supposed to see -- because, according to the judge, the prosecutor slipped it into the evidence box. And in the other case, the jury was not shown evidence it was supposed to see -- because the prosecutors never turned it over. Yet in neither case has any prosecutor who was to blame been fired.

Obviously, actions like these severely undermine defendants' rights. They also shake public confidence in our criminal justice system. And they mire that system in costly retrials that never would have had to take place if prosecutors had shown the jury the evidence it was meant to see --

and only that evidence -- in the first place.

This misconduct raises an important question: How can we prevent it from happening the future? I will argue that prosecutors should be able to be penalized by the bar of any state in which they practice -- and that the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility should be reformed to come down harder on cases of blatant misconduct, such as these.

Prosecutorial Misconduct In Virginia Federal Court

In July 2003, a jury convicted Jay Lentz was of kidnapping and murdering his wife and recommended that he spend the rest of his life in prison. But after the verdict, the judge -- U.S. District Judge Gerald Lee -- set aside the conviction on the kidnapping charge, finding insufficient evidence to support it.

Then, just two weeks ago, Judge Lee ordered a new trial on the murder charge. Why? Because shocking evidence of prosecutorial misconduct had surfaced.

Jurors had reported that evidence that the court had ruled inadmissible -- a calendar allegedly obtained from the possessions of the deceased--had made its way into the jury room anyway. There, they told the judge, it had been "very influential."

After a hearing, Judge Lee concluded that the chief prosecutor in the case, Steven D. Mellin, had put the calendar in the evidence box that had gone to the jury. He also made plain that he believed Mellin's misconduct was intentional, or at least reckless -- not merely an innocent mistake.

Rather than offering abashed apologies, the prosecutors insisted there was no proof of prosecutorial misconduct. (Earlier, they had insisted that the judge had had no authority to investigate them in the first place.) Clearly, the prosecutors though they were above the law. Fortunately, Judge Lee held otherwise.

Why would Mellin have done that? Recent reports give a possible reason. Unbeknownst to the defense or the court, he was intensely personally involved in the case. Indeed, he had asked to prosecute it. Maybe that involvement made him step over the line. Or, maybe he did nothing wrong at all, and Judge Lee just doesn't "like him." That is what Mellin says. He says Lee gave him "trouble" from the inception of the case.

But the point is this: Mellin plainly thought that he, not Judge Lee, should control the case and the courtroom. Indeed, courtroom interchanges between the two were characterized by Mellin "talking back" to the Judge in a way that no defense attorney could ever get away with.

Mellin is said to have asked the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to investigate him -- apparently hoping that it will clear him. But as I will explain below, even if Mellin were clearer by OPR, that would still be no guarantee he was innocent of wrongdoing.

Prosecutorial Misconduct In Detroit Federal Court

Last year, the well-known case involving an alleged Al Qaeda cell operating out of Detroit, Michigan went to trial. The prosecution's star witness was a jailhouse snitch. Defense attorneys claimed the witness had concocted a story about hearing defendants talk about their terrorist activity, in order to better his own position with respect to charges against him involving document fraud.

As is the norm now in "terrorism" trials, U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen imposed a gag order on all attorneys--including prosecutors. As I discussed in an earlier column, Attorney General John Ashcroft twice violated that order by going public--during the trial--with statements designed to bolster the credibility of certain government witnesses.

At the end of trial, some defendants were found guilty, and some were acquitted. But the guilty verdicts were soon put into question. It emerged that prosecutors had failed to turn over a crucial piece of exculpatory evidence to the defense.

The evidence was a letter from a jailmate of the star witness, the snitch. The man said the snitch had been bragging that he was lying in order to better his position with the government. In other words, the inmate specifically corroborated the defense's theory that the witness was making up his story up to try to get out of his own legal troubles.

Why did the prosecutors not turn the letter over -- as they were obligated to do with any and all exculpatory evidence, under Brady v. Maryland? They said they thought that it wasn't "important" -- given that all the other evidence, in their view, overwhelmingly pointed to guilt. In short, they appointed themselves judge and jury over the defendants' fate.

Furious once again, Judge Rosen has been conducting hearings and reading briefs on what he should do next. The prosecutors have been removed from the case, and the Justice Department is said to be investigating the matter. But the government's position, unbelievably, continues to be that the verdict -- however tainted by the withheld evidence -- should stand.

Disciplinary Options for Prosecutors Must Be Strengthened

Unlike defense attorneys, who must be licensed to practice law everywhere they practice, federal prosecutors only have to be licensed to practice law in one state. With a single bar admission, they can practice in any federal court in the land. The result is that only one state bar can investigate them -- and often, that state bar has no interest in doing so, for their alleged misconduct occurs in another state.

In the Lentz case, the Virginia State Bar reportedly "referred" Mellin to his licensing state of Texas, for "appropriate" action. But Texas's standards of practice are famously lax, and pro-

prosecution. Moreover, it is Virginia that has the interest in preventing misconduct here: A federal judge in a Virginia courthouse has held that Mellin committed misconduct.

What about federal disciplinary options when prosecutors go astray? Sadly, they are also weak.

In 2001, the General Accounting Office wrote a stinging report on the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility. It found that OPR rarely held prosecutors accountable for misconduct. And if OPR turned over a case over to the state that licensed an errant prosecutor, OPR rarely followed up.

In response to the report, Congress called on OPR to start doing a better job of self-policing. As Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-WI) remarked, "The public has a right to demand the highest ethical standards for its public servants, particularly those acting on their behalf in the legal system. Unfortunately, today's report indicates the OPR's procedures fall short of ensuring accountability for attorneys who commit ethics violations and ensuring public transparency of the process. Both areas are critical in maintaining integrity and public confidence in a self-regulating profession."

Did OPR improve itself? It's hard to tell. OPR is supposed to file an annual report, but the last one I found on its website was for 2001. It is filled with self-congratulatory reports of how well it is doing its job -- but it is also lacking in specifics. We should all watch closely to see if the Mellin and the Detroit cell prosecutors -- all of whom plainly committed misconduct -- are disciplined by OPR or not. If not, that in itself will be a strong sign that OPR is still not doing its job.

An Option for Judges Lee and Rosen: Contempt of Court for the Prosecutors

Judge Lee and Judge Rosen also have an option if they want to discipline the prosecutors who committed this misconduct -- and in these egregious cases, they should seriously consider availing themselves of it. The option is to hold those responsible in contempt of court -- and to impose upon them fines, or even temporary imprisonment.

Too harsh? If you think so, consider that these prosecutors were willing to send people to jail for far longer periods, based on evidence that was, in one case, tainted, and in the other, grossly incomplete. Would it really be so unfair for them to have a small taste of the confinement they might have subjected the defendants to for decades or, in the Lenz case, for life?

Elaine Cassel practices law in Virginia and the District of Columbia, teaches law and psychology, and has a web site on civil liberties. Her book, The Other War: The War At Home, about civil liberties post September 11, 2001, will be published in 2004 by Chicago Review Press.

Many Falsely Imprisoned By Prosecutors

by Michael J. Sniffen
Associated Press
June 26, 2003

WASHINGTON - State and local prosecutors bent or broke the rules to help put 32 innocent people in prison, some under death sentence, since 1970, according to the first nationwide study of prosecutorial misconduct.

Prosecutors misbehaved so badly in more than 2,000 cases during that period that appellate judges dismissed criminal charges, reversed convictions or reduced sentences, the study also found.

The study, "Harmful Error," found 223 prosecutors around the nation who had been cited by judges for two or more cases of unfair conduct but only two prosecutors who had been disbarred in the past 33 years for mishandling criminal cases. There are about 30,000 local prosecutors in 2,341 jurisdictions.

A product of three years of research by The Center for Public Integrity, a private ethics watchdog group, the study found 28 cases involving 32 defendants in which judges concluded that misconduct by prosecutors contributed to the convictions of innocent people.

These 32 were later exonerated, 12 of them by use of DNA genetic evidence. Some of these innocent defendants had been convicted of murder, rape or kidnaping; some had been under death sentence before exoneration spared them.

In another 26 cases, 31 innocent defendants were convicted despite their allegations of misconduct by prosecutors. But in those cases, all subsequently exonerated, appellate judges dismissed the misconduct allegations or ruled prosecutors committed "harmless error." DNA evidence exonerated 24 of them.

The report said convictions of an undetermined number of guilty defendants also were undoubtedly overturned because of unfair prosecutor tactics. Some of those defendants could not be retried and were set free, so prosecutor misconduct "has severe consequences for the entire citizenry," the report said.

Charles Lewis, executive director of the center, said that by focusing only on cases in which appellate judges found misconduct the study presented "an extremely conservative and undoubtedly understated picture of the problem." The study also excluded federal prosecutors.

Astoria, Ore., District Attorney Joshua Marquis, a National District Attorneys Association board member, said the cases that were cited emerged "from a universe of millions." The results suggested that the problem was "episodic, not epidemic" and that prosecutors "are and should be subject to a high degree of scrutiny by trial and appellate judges, defendants and defense lawyers, the press and bar associations and ultimately the voters," Marquis added.

Project director Steve Weinberg, a University of Missouri journalism professor on leave, said researchers found and analyzed 11,458 appellate rulings in which prosecutor misconduct was raised as an issue.

In 2,017 cases, appellate judges found misconduct serious enough to order dismissal of charges, reversal of convictions or reduction of sentences. In an additional 513 cases, at least one judge filing a separate concurring or dissenting opinion thought the misconduct warranted reversal.

In thousands more cases, judges labeled prosecutorial behavior inappropriate but characterized it as "harmless error" and allowed a conviction to stand or a trial to continue.

"We are really talking about misconduct in the cases that went to trial," Weinberg told a news conference, noting that, nationally, 95 percent of defendants who are charged never go to trial. A majority plead guilty without a trial; some charges are dropped.

"We eliminated more than 90 percent of all the criminal cases in the United States that could harbor misconduct," because there was no way to detect it, Weinberg said. But Washington University law professor Katherine Goldwasser, a former prosecutor, said it was not safe to assume that "guilty pleas are absent prosecutorial misconduct."

Study Results

The study found the following types of misconduct:

- Making inappropriate or inflammatory comments in front of the jury.

- Introducing or trying to introduce inadmissible or inflammatory evidence.

- Mischaracterizing evidence or facts to the court or jury.

- Excluding jurors on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or other discriminatory
grounds.

- Making improper closing arguments.

- Hiding, destroying or tampering with evidence, case files or court records.

- Failing to disclose exculpatory evidence.

- Threatening, badgering or tampering with witnesses.

- Using false or misleading evidence.

- Harassing, displaying bias toward or having a vendetta against a defendant or
defense lawyer, including denial of speedy trial and selective or vindictive
prosecution.

- Improper behavior during grand jury proceedings.

Among prosecutors repeatedly cited by appellate judges were:

-Nels C. Moss Jr., assistant circuit attorney in St. Louis and later

Nels C. Moss Jr., assistant circuit attorney in St. Louis and later trial prosecutor in neighboring St. Charles County in Missouri. In 33 years of trying cases, Moss' conduct was challenged on appeal in 25 cases. In eight cases, judges reversed convictions, declared a mistrial or issued some other ruling against the prosecution. In 17 other cases, judges found Moss committed prosecutorial error but affirmed a conviction or allowed a trial to continue.

Moss told researchers he was "a hard-hitting but honest prosecutor" who tried more than 400 cases and "obviously ... those convicted are dissatisfied with the outcomes."

To read more about Prosecutorial Misconduct go to site below:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/pm/printer-friendly.aspx?aid=40
http://www.publicintegrity.org/pm/

Prosecutors Not Penalized, Lawyer Says

By Andrea Elliott
New York Times
December 17, 2003

A lawyer who won the largest wrongful conviction settlement in the city's history said yesterday that during his investigation he uncovered dozens of cases of prosecutorial misconduct in the Bronx district attorney's office that did not result in disciplinary action. ....

Officials in the district attorney's office denied that prosecutorial misconduct was frequent or went unpunished. They said that in the 72 cases that Mr. Rudin highlighted, sanctions might have been issued that were not reflected in the prosecutors' personnel records. ....

Mr. Rudin's client, Alberto Ramos, won a $5 million settlement this month, 11 years after he was released from prison because of a wrongful conviction in a child sex abuse case. In the 1992 reversal, the judge found that the trial prosecutor had withheld evidence that most likely
would have exonerated Mr. Ramos. He later filed a civil suit, but to win damages from a jury he needed to prove that the prosecutor's actions were caused by a policy or practice of misconduct in the district attorney's office. The city settled on Sept. 4.

The withholding of exculpatory evidence and other forms of prosecutorial misconduct are problems in courts nationwide, legal experts say. There is disagreement about whether offending prosecutors are sanctioned often or severely enough, but the lack of disciplinary action by the Bronx district attorney in dozens of cases where misconduct was cited - with some prosecutors, repeatedly - is evidence of a policy of tolerance, Mr. Rudin said.

"Here you have people with the power to destroy lives, and when they do it by withholding evidence, there is no sanction," he said.

Officials in the Bronx district attorney's office said that the citings were not conclusive evidence that misconduct occurred willfully, or that a pattern existed, given the high volume of felony cases tried in the 21-year period - about 100,000.

Others in the legal profession said that misconduct was sometimes a necessary part of the learning curve. "Everybody makes mistakes - if we have a zero-tolerance policy in the legal profession, everyone is going to get disbarred," said Joshua K. Marquis, district attorney of Astoria, Ore., and a member of the board of directors of the National District Attorneys Association.
The cases that Mr. Rudin highlighted involved 74 prosecutors - 14 of whom were cited for misconduct in several cases. In one such case, a prosecutor who was hired in 1978 and retired in 1984 was cited for prosecutorial misconduct in the appellate decisions of five criminal
cases.

He was singled out in a manslaughter reversal in 1985 for "confusing and misleading the jury." In that ruling, the judge recalled the prosecutor's cited misconduct in another manslaughter case that had been reversed and concluded that his conduct and actions "can only be viewed as willful and deliberate."

But according to his personnel records, his salary continued to rise steadily until he retired, and included merit raises and bonuses.

Eighteen of the 72 cases involved prosecutors withholding evidence that might have helped the defendant. All 18 cases were overturned.

Among them was People v. Lantigua, a murder case that went to trial in 1992. The case depended on a sole witness who allegedly saw the murder from her window. Prosecutors argued that she was alone and had no distraction, when the witness had confided to one of the prosecutors before the trial that she had "snuck out" to meet a man.

The judge said the failure to disclose the conversation was "especially egregious." The prosecutors were never sanctioned, according to their personnel records, Mr. Rudin said.

Mr. Ramos was 21 years old and a part-time employee at the Concourse Day Care Center in the Bronx when, in 1984, he was arrested and charged with raping a 5-year-old girl whose class he helped supervise. While in prison, Mr. Ramos, 40, said he endured beatings, was sodomized and tried to commit suicide several times.

"Every day for me was hell," Mr. Ramos said in an interview at his attorney's office. Mr. Ramos, who recently left the military and wants to be a chef, said he did not want to talk about the millions he won.

"I don't think it's really about the money," said Mr. Ramos, sitting upright in a crisply ironed blue shirt and tie, his hands folded tightly in front of him. "I think it's about an injustice done to a minority who didn't have the funds of someone who was better off."

Mr. Ramos's conviction largely rested, Mr. Rudin said, on the testimony of one of the doctors, who said the girl would not have been able to describe in such detail what happened to her if she had not been abused.

What the jury never heard was testimony from day care center workers that the girl had masturbated frequently in class and had extensive knowledge of sexual acts prior to the alleged abuse. They also never heard testimony that the child had told city social workers that Mr. Ramos had done nothing to her.
The trial prosecutor, Diana Farrell, had the obligation to make this evidence known to the defense, and failed to do so, according to the 1992 reversal. Officials of the district attorney's office said they were not at liberty to discuss whether any disciplinary action was taken against
Ms. Farrell. Repeated efforts to get in touch with Ms. Farrell, who is no longer with the district attorney's office, were unsuccessful.

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