Over the past week, I've been reading the San Jose Mercury News' massive and much-recommended five-part series, "Tainted Trials, Stolen Justice." Based on a three-year investigation, the report looks at 727 court cases in Santa Clara County over a five year period. In over a third of the cases, the paper found, trials were marred by questionable conduct that worked against the defendants—who, judging from the case studies, tended to be minorities and poor—and a number of cases led to wrongful convictions. Among the findings:

In nearly 100 cases, prosecutors engaged in questionable conduct, including withholding evidence, defying a judge's orders or misleading juries. "Experts say individual prosecutors reflect the dominant culture in their office, and too often it's all about winning rather than ethics and fairness." Often district attorney offices are extremely slow—taking years and years—to discipline prosecutors who overstep their bounds.

The Mercury News was "unable to determine" whether Santa Clara County was particularly dysfunctional or whether its problems mirrored those of justice systems elsewhere in the country. I'd note that Santa Clara, while relatively liberal in most things, is considered a "tough on crime" region, one of the six highest sentencing counties in California during the '90s, with law enforcement agencies that practiced "broken windows" policing and invoked the "Three Strikes" law at extremely high rates. Interestingly, in the 1990s, San Francisco under the "ultraliberal" DA Terrence Hallinan saw its crime rate decrease much more rapidly than Santa Clara's did. Go figure. At any rate, read the series, it's a good one.

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