Appeals Exausted, New Evidence Available ???
Q: I know an individual who exhausted all available appeals in Mississippi. Recently, however, the prosecution's professional witness has been stripped of his license for unethical conduct, another individual has confessed responsibility for some of the acts in question, and new revelations as to the competency of his counsel during the original trial have surfaced. How does one go about filing an appeal based on new evidence? Is there any way possible to do this without a lawyer? This guy doesn't have a single penny to his name.
A: -It is going to take cooperation from the prosecutors and the executive. US criminal procedure is based on a "gotcha" principle: justice is only a consideration, if ever, at the trial stage. From then on one looks for legal and procedural errors. The defense of "incompetent attorney" is relatively new, and doesn't work except in most egregious cases. Perjured evidence is problematic. Much depends on Mississippi law and practice, of which I know rather little. I know more of English practice and the work of Bob Woffinden ("Miscarriages of Justice"). In England, usually after pressure from the Press, a case may be referred back to the court of appeal years later. As I understand it in the USA that is a matter of clemency, and we all know the problems Texas death penalty defendants have had; and Illinois ones too, until the governor commuted all their sentences. As for your kind of problem: think of Sir Roy Meadows, the inventor of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy -- now discredited and facing losing his medical license ("struck off"); but the mothers he had convicted of murder because their babies died of SIDS are just now having their cases re-heard. And think of Tulia, Texas, where if it hadn't been for Bob Herbert of the New York Times and a few others, dozens of innocent, penniless African Americans would still be rotting in prison on perjured evidence. You will need to prove, in your case, that the "unethical conduct" was more than, say, tax evasion reflecting on the witness's