Eric McDavid was running late for his interview Wednesday, unavoidably delayed when a detective asked to chat with him after he stopped at the Placer County Sheriff’s Office to register as an arsonist.
After nine years in federal custody, McDavid, 37, had been out of prison just six days and was still adjusting to life on the outside. Until earlier this month, McDavid was scheduled to remain in prison another eight years – until Feb. 10, 2023 – following his 2007 conviction for conspiring to blow up and burn the Nimbus Dam, a U.S. Forest Service genetics lab and cellphone towers.
But in a twist described as unprecedented by the judge overseeing the case, McDavid won his release on Jan. 8 after agreeing to plead guilty to a lesser charge: a single count of conspiracy to attack a government facility that, had he made the same deal nine years earlier, would have cost him, at most, five years in prison. That guilty plea, which came with a promise by McDavid not to appeal or sue the government, resulted in his immediate release. His previous conviction and sentence were wiped out by an order of the court.
The dramatic shift followed a concession by authorities that information the defense had a legal right to acquire before McDavid’s trial was not turned over as it should have been. Instead, thousands of pages were not produced until after his trial, with nearly 2,500 pages handed over in 2010 as his lawyers continued to fight his conviction.
It was not until November 2014 that the government produced the letter and series of emails between McDavid and an FBI informant that led to the deal that won him his release...
more
See The Untouchables: America's Misbehaving Prosecutors
A 2006 review
in the Yale Law Journal concluded that "[a] prosecutor's violation of
the obligation to disclose favorable evidence accounts for more
miscarriages of justice than any other type of malpractice, but is
rarely sanctioned by courts, and almost never by disciplinary bodies."
No comments:
Post a Comment