Can Prosecutors Be Sued By People They Framed? : NPR

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Can Prosecutors Be Sued By People They Framed?

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November 4, 2009

Do prosecutors have total immunity from lawsuits for anything they do, including framing someone for murder? That is the question the justices of the Supreme Court face Wednesday.

On one side of the case being argued are Iowa prosecutors who contend "there is no freestanding right not to be framed." They are backed by the Obama administration, 28 states and every major prosecutors organization in the country.

On the other side are two black men — Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee — men who served 25 years in prison before evidence long hidden in police files resulted in them being freed.

Harrington, McGhee And The Principal Witness

Back in 1977, Harrington, captain of his Omaha high school football team, was applying to college and being recruited for a possible scholarship at Yale.

Then he and McGhee were arrested for the murder of a retired police officer in neighboring Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the state line.

The principal witness was 16-year-old Kevin Hughes, who had a criminal record, and after being arrested in a stolen car, first fingered two other men, one of whom turned out to have been in jail on the night of the crime.

After his first stories didn't pan out, Hughes implicated Harrington and McGhee, but his eyewitness account was riddled with errors.

He initially got the site of the shooting wrong and the weapon. He said the murder was committed with a handgun, then said a 20-gauge shotgun and finally a 12-gauge shotgun.

He also failed a polygraph test. According to lawyers for Harrington and McGhee, the Council Bluffs police and prosecutors knew all this and more. But they went ahead and indicted the two men, winning convictions before an all-white jury.

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