Objection, Your Honors

It’s hard to imagine a more sympathetic plaintiff than Thomas L. Goldstein, a Long Beach man who spent 24 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. But the U.S. Supreme Court would be making a mistake if it allowed Goldstein and other wrongfully convicted defendants to sue prosecutors for management decisions that may have contributed to their convictions.

This week, the court agreed to review a decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that Goldstein may seek damages from former L.A. County Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp on the theory that the district attorney failed to institute procedures to make sure that trial prosecutors knew if their witnesses had received favors from the government.

One such witness, Edward Fink, had testified that Goldstein, his cellmate, had confessed to shooting a neighbor. Fink denied that he had received favors from county officials for incriminating Goldstein, but years later it emerged that Fink had served as a police informant and had received reduced sentences. That fact was known to some officials in the district attorney’s office, but not to the trial prosecutors.

Goldstein, who was released in 2004, wants to sue Van de Kamp for damages under a civil rights law known as Section 1983. The allegation isn’t that the district attorney knew a government witness was lying on the stand, it’s that he failed to institute a system of information sharing that would have allowed the prosecutors who put Fink on the stand to know his history.

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors have absolute immunity to Section 1983 lawsuits. Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote that immunity is rooted in a concern that “harassment by unfounded litigation would cause a deflection of the prosecutor’s energies from his public duties” and tempt a prosecutor to “shade his decisions instead of exercising the independence of justice required by the public trust.” Powell noted that the law provided other checks on errors or misdeeds by prosecutors.

Given this precedent, how could the 9th Circuit permit a suit against Van de Kamp? The appeals court noted that the absolute immunity covered only decisions by prosecutors that are “intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process.” By contrast, the court said, the district attorney’s alleged failure to disseminate information about informants was an “administrative” action not closely related to what went on in court. That strikes us as hairsplitting. Appalling as Goldstein’s ordeal was, it doesn’t alter the fact that he is suing the county’s chief prosecutor for a miscarriage of justice. Unless the Supreme Court wants to dispense with prosecutorial immunity altogether, it’s difficult to see why he should prevail.