Encyclopedia > Police fraud

  Article Content

Prosecutorial misconduct

Redirected from Police fraud

Prosecutorial misconduct (a term of jurisprudence) refers to a procedural defense; via which, a defendant may argue that they should not be held criminally liable for actions which broke the law, because the prosecution acted in an "inappropriate" or "unfair" manner. Such arguments may involve allegations that the prosecution withheld evidence or knowingly permitted false testimony. This is similar to selective prosecution. In late 1993, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals[?] ruled that John Demjanjuk had been a victim of prosecutorial misconduct during a 1986 trial in which federal prosecutors withheld evidence. Demjanjuk's sentence was overturned, but he lost when his case was retried.

In the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson, the defense argued that Los Angeles Police Department detective Mark Fuhrman had planted "evidence" at the crime scene[?]. Although Fuhrman denied the allegations, Simpson was found "not guilty". In USA Today (August 24, 1995), Francis Fukuyama stated, "[Such defenses lead to] a distrust of government and the belief that public authorities are in a vast conspiracy to violate the rights of individuals."



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Rameses

... page; that is, one that just points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 24.6 ms