Revisiting the Prison Protection Subpoena

It’s time to revisit the legal protection subpoena. Too usually, authorities disclosures aren’t getting defendants the knowledge they should meaningfully counter the prosecution’s model of the details and keep away from wrongful conviction or extreme punishment. Latest exonerations and disclosure shortfalls in state and federal courts spotlight this danger. Moderately than rely completely on prosecutors to treatment this downside, legal defendants can and must be empowered to make use of obligatory course of to uncover the reality themselves.

This isn’t nearly prosecutorial misconduct. The Nationwide Registry of Exonerations, for instance, discovered that official misconduct was a contributing consider solely barely greater than half of the wrongful convictions it analyzed, a statistic that features misconduct by regulation enforcement brokers which can have been hidden from prosecutors.