Jan. 12 NORTH CAROLINA: Disciplining Prosecutors Members of the N.C. State Bar need to press their organization to become more aggressive at pursuing misconduct cases against prosecutors, because the organization's record on two recent cases leaves much to be desired. In a ruling issued last week, the bar dismissed a complaint against 2 former prosecutors that it had charged with lying, cheating and withholding evidence in a death penalty trial because the bar said that complaint was not filed in time. Yet Lane Williamson, a Charlotte laywer who headed the disciplinary panel that handled the case, called the rule on the deadline hopelessly ambiguous and suggested that the rules be rewritten, according to the Raleigh News & Observer. Something needs to happen, because the case involving Kenneth Honeycutt, a former district attorney in Union County who's now in private practice, and Scott Brewer, who's now a district court judge, is egregious. In 1996, they prosecuted Jonathan Hoffman in the robbery and murder of Danny Cook, a jewelry-store owner in Marshville. The State Bar said that Honeycutt agreed to reward a star witness, Johnell Porter, with immunity from state and federal prosecutors, money and a reduction in his federal sentence. The bar had also charged that Honeycutt and Brewer hid the deal from the jury, the trial judge and Hoffman's lawyers. That's galling - especially since Porter said recently that he made up his testimony against Hoffman to get the deal. Hoffman won a new trial. But the question of the bar's handling of prosecutorial misconduct lingers. Consider that in 2004, a three-member panel of the bar ruled that 2 prosecutors who put Alan Gell of Bertie County away for murder violated ethical standards by withholding witness statements and a tape-recording in which the state's star witness said she had to "make up a story" for officers investigating the murder of which Gell was convicted. Yet all the panel gave the former prosecutors was a reprimand - for conduct that kept Gell in prison for nine years, with half of that time on death row, until he was acquitted in a retrial. In regard to the complaint against Honeycutt and Brewer, the bar should re-examine its deadline rule on filing complaints. If defense attorneys were in fact too late in filing their complaint in this case, the deadline rule should be rewritten to ensure that there's no such confusion in the future. The bar should make sure it's handling all its complaints involving prosecutors as well as it can. Most of the prosecutors in this state act ethically in the pursuit of justice. But not all do, and the bar should become more aggressive in pursuing cases against that tiny minority. (source: Winston-Salem Journal) INDIANA: Suicide note detailed death row pressures A convicted murderer who was denied his wish to be executed left a suicide note in which he wrote of the pain of watching others on death row agonize over their fates. Charles E. Roche Jr., 42, of Hammond, was found dead in his Indiana State Prison cell early Tuesday hanging from a bedsheet braided into a rope and tied around his neck, the Indiana Department of Correction said. "I'm tired of getting close to these guys in here and then watch them slowly crack as they near their fate," said the note released Tuesday by Roches attorney. "That's worse (than) a death sentence." Attorney Lemuel Stigler said Roche requested that the 4-page letter, in which he explained his reasons for taking his own life, be released to reporters. The letter was dated Friday. Roche also complained about changes in a policy governing correspondence written by prisoners. Roche said he "could not take the head games of prison officials any more. They have begun a new policy which now invades the most basic privacy right we had which was being able to send out our mail sealed. Now all our personal letters must be mailed out open for staff to go through." Prison spokesman Barry Nothstine said inmates' correspondence, both that which they send and that received, have for many years been examined by prison officials to check for contraband. Roche had shown no signs of being suicidal and was not on a suicide watch at the time of his death. Roche was sentenced to death for the 1990 shooting deaths of Ernest Graves of Calumet City, Ill., and Daniel Brown of Louisville, Ky. (source: Associated Press)
