You think your going to get a "fair trial" - Don't make me laugh!

This is a series of articles so you may want to check the USA Today web page for more stories on this subject!

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Federal prosecutors likely to keep jobs after cases collapse

By Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy, USA TODAY

TAMPA — What happened to the baby girl is a mystery.

What happened to the federal prosecutor who handled the case against Sabrina Aisenberg's parents is not: A Justice Department inquiry found that he recklessly broke the rules when he charged them with lying about her disappearance.

The Florida Bar admonished the prosecutor, Stephen Kunz. The government dropped its case against Sabrina's parents, and paid defense lawyers nearly $1.5 million, the largest such sanction ever imposed against the Justice Department for its mishandling of a criminal case. And Kunz lost his position handling criminal cases for the U.S. Attorney's Office here.

"I told him, 'You're not going to be a criminal prosecutor here,' " former U.S. attorney Paul Perez recalls. Instead, Perez says he gave Kunz a choice: work on a team that handled civil lawsuits or look for a new job. Kunz soon found a job 200 miles away in Tallahassee.

As a federal prosecutor.

The episode — which unfolded over eight years beginning in 1997 — offers a rare window into the U.S. Justice Department's effort to police abuses by the lawyers in charge of enforcing the nation's laws. A USA TODAY investigation has found that prosecutors have little reason to fear losing their jobs, even if they violate laws or constitutional safeguards designed to ensure the justice system is fair.

Justice Department officials say they take every violation of those rules seriously. But USA TODAY's investigation, based on an examination of tens of thousands of pages of court files and reviewed by a panel of legal experts, found:

• The Justice Department often classifies as mistakes violations that result in overturned convictions. Even when judges have cited prosecutors for flouting constitutional rules, the government often clears the attorneys of wrongdoing and concludes the violations were unintentional. The agency's internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), found wrongdoing in about one-quarter of the roughly 750 complaints it investigated during the past decade.

• Even when investigators conclude that prosecutors committed misconduct, they are unlikely to be fired. Department records suggest that violations more often result in reprimands, suspensions or agreements that allow lawyers to leave the government with their reputations intact and their records unblemished.

After a judge in Massachusetts freed two convicted Mafia figures from prison because of " extremely serious government misconduct" by the lead prosecutor, for example, officials gave the prosecutor a written reprimand. U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf wrote in a 2008 letter to then-attorney general Michael Mukasey that the episode — which occurred before Mukasey became attorney general — "raises serious questions about whether judges should continue to rely upon the Department to investigate and sanction misconduct by federal prosecutors."

• The Justice Department consistently conceals its own investigations of misconduct from the public. Officials say privacy laws prevent them from revealing any details of their investigations. That secrecy, however, makes it almost impossible to assess the full extent and impact of misconduct by prosecutors or the effectiveness of the department's attempts to deter it.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Tracy Schmaler, said in a statement that USA TODAY's "selective review of a handful of the many thousands of cases stretching back as far as 18 years does little to provide an accurate and representative picture of the honorable work done by federal prosecutors in courtrooms every day across the country." She said that "when mistakes occur, we correct them as quickly and transparently as possible within the bounds of the law."

Attorney General Eric Holder, who took over the Justice Department in 2009, has said the agency is moving to make sure it can more effectively prevent misconduct and better train prosecutors about the complex rules they must follow. The changes, including new training and policies, followed the failed corruption case against former Alaska senator Ted Stevens.

For years, however, says Joseph DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., the bottom line was that the government allowed lawyers "who should not be federal prosecutors to continue in that role. The record on discipline is very, very poor. The history of serious discipline is basically non-existent."

USA TODAY's investigation documented 201 cases since 1997 in which courts found that federal prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules. Although those violations occurred in no more than a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of criminal cases filed in federal courts every year, each one was so serious that judges overturned convictions, threw out charges or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct. The violations put innocent people in jail, set guilty people free and cost millions of dollars in legal fees.

Without stronger safeguards, Justice Department critics say, those problems will continue.

"It's a disgrace to the Department of Justice, it's a disgrace to the system, it's a disgrace to what we're supposed to stand for," says Barry Cohen, the Tampa defense attorney who represented Sabrina Aisenberg's parents. He says Kunz, the prosecutor, should have been fired —— and prosecuted.

Both Kunz and his current boss, U.S. Attorney Pamela Marsh in Tallahassee, did not respond to requests for interviews USA TODAY sent to an office spokesman.

The missing girl

Sabrina Aisenberg was 5 months old when she disappeared from her crib one night in November 1997.

The story her parents, Steven and Marlene Aisenberg, told the police was horrifying: They awoke that morning to find their daughter's crib empty and their back door ajar. The authorities searched everywhere for the missing baby, scouring the area near her home in Valrico, Fla., outside Tampa, seeking any clue that could tell them where she had gone. They found nothing.

Eventually, investigators focused their suspicions on the girl's parents. Investigators from the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office got warrants to secretly install listening devices in their bedroom and kitchen, recording thousands of conversations over three months. State prosecutors nonetheless concluded that they did not have enough evidence to prosecute the couple. But in 1999, almost two years after Sabrina vanished, federal prosecutors announced that they had solved the girl's mysterious disappearance, and charged the Aisenbergs with conspiracy and lying to investigators.

The recordings were the most damning evidence. On one, prosecutors told a grand jury and a magistrate judge, Marlene Aisenberg could be heard telling her husband: "The baby's dead and buried. … The baby's dead no matter what you say — you just did it."

But there was a problem with the recordings: Almost everyone who listened to them concluded that they didn't actually contain the statements prosecutors had presented to the grand jury that indicted the couple. U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday listened to the tapes and said he couldn't hear the incriminating statements. Perez, the former U.S. attorney, said he couldn't find them, either — even though the prosecutors, led by Kunz, had assured the court that the statements were there.

After a judge ruled the tapes inadmissible, the Justice Department took the unusual step of withdrawing the charges against the Aisenbergs before their trial began. Then it conceded in court that it should pay their legal bills under a law known as the Hyde Amendment, which requires the government to compensate people if the charges against them were "vexatious." The department ultimately paid $1,494,650.

OPR investigated Kunz's handling of the Aisenberg case. Its report — never made public, but summarized in state bar records— concluded that Kunz had recklessly tried to inflame the grand jury against the Aisenbergs and included unreliable excerpts from the recordings in the indictment. But its investigation also rejected Merryday's finding that the decision to charge the Aisenbergs had been "vexatious" or undertaken in "bad faith."

Kunz's bosses at the U.S. Attorney's Office stripped him of his position as a supervisor while OPR investigated. In 2002, Perez — who once had counted Kunz as a mentor — reassigned him to the civil division before Kunz eventually quit. The Florida Bar, which regulates lawyers in the state, publicly admonished Kunz in 2005, the mildest form of public discipline it could impose but nonetheless an uncommon rebuke for a federal prosecutor. Justice Department records show Kunz has been assigned to criminal cases in Tallahassee since 2003.

"It's kind of a travesty," said Steven Aisenberg, Sabrina's father, who lives in Maryland with his wife and two other children. Kunz "fabricated information, and he still has a job doing what he did before. Now he lives to do it again, to somebody else."

Aisenberg said the family is still searching for Sabrina. She would have turned 13 last June.

The watchdog

The Office of Professional Responsibility was founded in 1975 as part of an effort to restore public confidence after the Watergate scandal. Criticism soon followed. In 1990, for example, a congressional committee blasted the office, saying it failed to investigate some judicial findings that prosecutors had committed misconduct.

OPR's founder, Michael Shaheen, retired in 1997 amid an investigation by the Justice Department's Inspector General that ultimately concluded he and two top deputies had themselves committed misconduct by violating government travel regulations. Before he died in 2007, Shaheen told National Public Radio that OPR should be abolished, because it was "plagued by a history of delays and the bureaucratic layers superimposed on it, and by the end of an investigation — two, three years — you find that they've labored and brought forth … a squeak, or a mouse."

OPR's records bear that out. Its investigations, run by agency attorneys, typically take at least a year to complete, and dozens have gone on for more than two years, a USA TODAY analysis of data obtained from the office shows. The vast majority of those investigations conclude that prosecutors did not break the rules, or that any violations were unintentional and should not be punished.

From 2000 to 2009, OPR's annual reports show, the office completed investigations of 756 complaints — fewer than 10% of the total complaints it received — and found that lawyers had actually committed misconduct in 196 cases.

"Government lawyers are likely to view the conduct most favorably to other government lawyers," says Ellen Yaroshefsky, the head of Cardozo Law School's Jacob Burns Ethics Center in New York. She said an outside watchdog is needed. "It's human nature that you're going to give the person the benefit of the doubt, because it could be you next. There just needs to be an independent evaluation of allegations of misconduct."

Records show the Justice Department has cleared prosecutors even when courts found problems. For example:

•A court in Pennsylvania rejected an inmate's death sentence for torturing, then killing his cellmate because the prosecutor never disclosed evidence the inmate could have used to challenge the allegation that he had planned the murder in advance. OPR, disagreeing with the court, found that the prosecutor did not commit misconduct and was not required to turn over the evidence.

•A federal appeals court overturned a man's conviction for a Tennessee bank robbery because it found the prosecutor "clearly misrepresented" evidence to the jury in "deliberate disregard of his duty," the court said. OPR disagreed, saying the prosecutor had made a mistake, not committed misconduct, according to an analysis for the American Civil Liberties Union.

"It's just astonishing to me that the system over there just flouts federal appellate courts' findings — in some instances even disagreeing that it's misconduct at all, let alone how serious it is," says Richard Strafer, a Miami lawyer who conducted the ACLU's review.

A House oversight committee leveled a similar complaint in a report two decades ago, noting that Justice "has not provided an explanation for its disagreement with the judge's findings."

OPR takes that approach because its investigations focus as much on why a prosecutor broke the rules as they do on whether there was a violation. The Justice Department cites its attorneys for misconduct only when it can prove the violations were either intentional or reckless. More often, records show, it concludes that violations were the result of poor judgment, inexperience or excusable mistakes. In addition, OPR sometimes disputes courts' interpretations of the complex rules prosecutors must follow.

When it finds misconduct, OPR can only recommend a range of disciplinary penalties — for example, from 5 to 15 days' suspension without pay — but cannot impose the punishment itself. The recommendations go to the U.S. Attorney in the area where the prosecutor works. The penalty is imposed by the prosecutor's supervisor, but can be appealed to the deputy attorney general, the No. 2 official at Justice, and in some situations to an outside board. It can be a lengthy process.

The Justice Department would not release a complete list of disciplinary actions it has taken to punish misconduct; USA TODAY first asked for one in May 2009. The department's annual reports, which summarize some of the cases it investigated, suggest that lawyers are seldom fired for mishandling criminal cases. In the past decade, the agency's annual reports have disclosed only one instance in which a lawyer was terminated: a 2009 investigation that showed the Department of Justice attorney had been unlicensed for more than five years and had filed false certifications that hid the truth. In four other cases, OPR reported that it recommended termination, but the lawyers either resigned or retired.

Leslie Griffin, who worked as an attorney at OPR in the late 1990s and now teaches at the University of Houston, said the office has an "almost impossible job" because it is expected to police its own lawyers, protect their privacy and satisfy the public. "Self-policing never works," she said. "That's part of the problem. Do we really think that doctors police their own very well? No."

Trouble in Washington, D.C.

By the early 1990s, gang violence had turned murder into an almost daily event in Washington, D.C. Unlike other parts of the country, where homicides and other violent crimes are handled by state prosecutors, the job of putting Washington's killers in prison falls to the Justice Department. Many of the toughest cases ended up on the desk of G. Paul Howes.

In 1996, Holder, then the U.S. attorney in Washington, asked OPR to investigate Howes' prosecution of four members of a gang known as the Newton Street Crew. The probe lasted two years. OPR concluded that Howes had improperly given tens of thousands of dollars' worth of government witness vouchers to relatives and girlfriends of people who helped him build his case.

The Justice Department maintains that such intentional abuses are rare. But former OPR lawyers and outside investigators have said the agency overlooks some wrongdoing. One reason: Even when OPR finds that a prosecutor committed misconduct in one case, its investigators do not always look to see whether any of the prosecutor's other cases were compromised. Griffin says it's important that officials not "overinvestigate" prosecutors because of a single mistake, but the result is that the department can't detect the full extent of misconduct. It didn't in Howes' case.

If OPR had looked more deeply, it would have unearthed what the D.C. Bar Counsel's office later found when it conducted its own investigation: additional vouchers Howes had improperly approved for witnesses in another homicide. Instead of investigating further, the Justice Department spent two years fighting to keep its file on Howes from reaching defense attorneys in that case.

When a federal judge ordered Justice to release its findings in 2003, prosecutors agreed to shorten three other murderers' sentences. This year, attorneys for another man Howes prosecuted asked the D.C. Court of Appeals to throw out his conviction because of the payments.

The court also is considering whether to disbar Howes, who declined to comment. He left the Justice Department in 1995 and went on to represent Enron investors in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. Howes testified in Washington's Superior Court in 2007 — in another hearing questioning his use of vouchers — that he "never went to trial with anybody that I did not think was guilty."

'A black hole'

The Justice Department refuses to discuss its misconduct investigations, though Congress has repeatedly urged more transparency. In 1978, for example, Congress asked the department to make the results of its investigations public. That happened for roughly seven years under Attorney General Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's appointee, when OPR released summaries of its investigations that included prosecutors' names.

But — with the exception of a few investigations of high-ranking officials — OPR has not revealed the names of prosecutors it found committed misconduct in almost a decade. Justice officials told USA TODAY that a federal law known as the Privacy Act, enacted in 1974, bars them from releasing any details, even when the problems have been widely publicized. Instead, it produces anonymous annual reports without any identifying details, even genders, of the prosecutors involved.

"OPR is a black hole. Stuff goes in, nothing comes out," said Jim Lavine, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "The public, the defense attorneys and the judiciary have lost respect for the government's ability to police themselves."

OPR's former director, Mary Patrice Brown, who recently took a new job in the criminal division, said the office is considering taking additional steps to disclose the results of its investigations. The office also has caught up on its annual reports, which had been several years behind, and the summaries are more detailed than in the past.

It's not just its own files that the department keeps secret. In some cases, it has asked judges to expunge misconduct findings from public court records.

Two years ago, for instance, a federal judge in San Diego overturned a guilty verdict in a drug case against Kellie Shaver because the prosecutor who handled her case, Christopher Ott, never told the court that a witness had raised questions about some of the evidence he relied on during Shaver's trial. Prosecutors didn't quarrel with the court's ruling that Shaver's trial had been unfair — but they asked the judge to leave Ott's name out of it. Prosecutors also cut a deal with Shaver: She could plead guilty and go free immediately. In return, her lawyers couldn't oppose their request to conceal Ott's name.

Ott, now a federal prosecutor in Central Islip, N.Y., declined to comment, through a spokesman.

The prosecutor who negotiated Shaver's plea, Stewart Young, said Ott was not involved in the agreement. The Justice Department's investigation of the case is confidential.

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Defendant, prosecutor in case say they were wronged

By Kevin McCoy and Brad Heath, USA TODAY

EUGENE, Ore. — Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Kent unexpectedly found himself in the legal cross hairs in 2003. That's when a federal appeals court ruled the prosecutor had interfered with the constitutional rights of William Danielson, a well-known outdoorsman he sent to federal prison for illegal deer-hunting.

Two years later, it was the Department of Justice's turn to be accused of wrongdoing. An administrative law judge ruled that the department failed to prove most of the misconduct allegations it made in disciplining Kent for his handling of the Danielson case.

"The so-called ethics police violated the same rules they falsely accused me of violating," says Kent, now 66 and retired. "They created false evidence and hid exonerating evidence. How can that system be trusted?"

The case spotlights questions about the Office of Professional Responsibility, the Justice Department watchdog agency that can save or ruin a federal prosecutor's career as it enforces legal and ethics rules.

On one side of the showdown was Danielson, a hunting guide whose skill at tracking Columbia black-tailed deer brought him nationwide clientele and mentions in hunting magazines. On the other was Kent, whose career wins included historic Illinois corruption cases during the 1980s.

After an Oregon State Police probe, a federal grand jury here indicted Danielson in 1999 for possession, sale and interstate transport of illegally taken wildlife.

The prosecution led by Kent had a secret weapon: A tenant on Danielson's property, Wayne Sava, told the police the guide had discussed asking him to lie on the witness stand. Police outfitted Sava with a wire and secretly recorded conversations between the two. The tapes suggested Danielson might tamper with the jury. Powerful as it was, the evidence also posed a problem: It is unconstitutional for prosecutors to interfere with attorney-defendant consultations, a ban that includes gaining access to defense trial strategy.

Trying to prevent that, Kent instructed police not to tell him anything they learned about Danielson's trial plans. He also said Sava shouldn't ask the guide about his defense strategy. Sava ignored the warning, though Kent said he did not know it then.

Kent also consulted with his bosses and Justice Department experts in Washington, who approved the continued investigation of Danielson. He didn't disclose the taped conversations until the trial's end.

Bryan Lessley, an assistant federal public defender, unsuccessfully sought a mistrial for Danielson on grounds Kent had a legal obligation to tell the defense about the evidence sooner. But Lessley succeeded in suppressing the tapes. The jury convicted Danielson on one count of selling and transporting a deer killed by a client without having a state tag. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

The case was unusual; relatively few hunting violations are prosecuted as federal felonies. Danielson says fellow inmates at the medium-security Sheridan Federal Correctional Institution laughed in disbelief when he told them why he was behind bars.

Danielson, now 56, appealed. He had served 13 months before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a hearing that could have given him a new trial. The 2003 decision said Kent's efforts to insulate himself from the off-limits evidence weren't enough: "The government's interference with Danielson's attorney-client relationship was neither accidental nor unavoidable, but was rather the result of deliberate and affirmative acts."

Instead of opting for a potential hearing that could have led to a retrial, Danielson reached a deal with the Justice Department: He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, was freed early and regained his right to own a gun and the deer trophies police had seized. "I don't have a million dollars to spend on a case over a set of deer antlers," he said recently. "But apparently the government did."

The Office of Professional Responsibility investigated Kent after the trial. Its 66-page report, issued in September 2003 report, went further than the appeals court. It said Kent had committed misconduct by violating Danielson's Sixth Amendment rights, misleading a federal court and failing to give the defense the tapes. A hearing officer upheld the findings.

Kent got a 15-day unpaid suspension. He appealed OPR's findings to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which reviews actions taken against federal employees.

In December 2005, Administrative Law Judge Anthony Ellison overturned most of the case against Kent. Ellison found that OPR misstated some of what Kent told investigators, a discrepancy that undercut Kent's insistence that he didn't read tape transcripts about Danielson's strategy until after the trial.

The judge also agreed that Kent had consulted with his bosses and Justice Department experts about the best way to use the taped evidence without violating Danielson's rights. That showed he did not commit intentional or reckless misconduct, Ellison wrote.

The judge let stand only two lesser violations Kent had admitted: that he'd lost his temper with the trial judge over what he felt were unfair questions about his integrity and that he had given a reporter for The (Eugene, Ore.) Register-Guard a copy of a publicly filed prosecution brief, a breach of Justice Department rules. Citing Kent's exemplary career and OPR's failure to produce "preponderant evidence of its most serious" charges, Ellison cut his suspension to three days. "If ever there was a case in which every benefit of the doubt should be given, this is it," he wrote.

The Justice Department declined to answer questions about the case from USA TODAY.

Danielson, told by USA TODAY about the outcome, said Kent "should have gotten a year, like I did, and been disbarred," a possibility that both Ellison and the judge who presided over the Danielson trial recommended against. Kent, who retired in 2006 after 30 years as a federal prosecutor, hailed the outcome as "an almost total vindication of my actions."

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States can discipline federal prosecutors, rarely do

By Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors who violate laws or cut corners to win convictions face almost no risk of losing their ability to practice law, USA TODAY has found.

Congress in 1998 gave the state regulators who oversee all of the nation's lawyers the authority to discipline U.S. Justice Department prosecutors when they violate laws or state ethics rules. Those regulators have the power to suspend and disbar lawyers.

To find out how often that happens, USA TODAY reviewed bar records and state court filings nationwide, and also searched for hundreds of prosecutors' names in a national databank of disciplinary actions maintained by the American Bar Association. It found only six prosecutors who were disciplined since 1997.

State regulators are considering disciplinary action in at least two other cases. One of those prosecutors, assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Auerhahn, has a hearing scheduled for today in a Massachusetts court.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that prosecutors cannot be sued for violating defendants' rights. It said they can be disbarred instead.

But even when state bar officials take action, it is uncommon for them to take away a federal prosecutor's law license, even temporarily. USA TODAY identified only two federal prosecutors who had their licenses suspended for even brief periods as a result of their handling of a criminal case.

One reason disciplinary actions are rare is regulators may find that the violations were not deliberate. "Many violations found by the courts are not malicious evil wrongdoing," says Bill Weigel, president of the National Organization of Bar Counsel, an association of state disciplinary officials. "People can lose their judgment in the heat of battle."

The Justice Department refers its prosecutors to state regulators when its own internal investigations find misconduct. But studies have found that state officials rarely discipline prosecutors. One this year by the Northern California Innocence Project found California authorities disciplined only about 1% of the prosecutors who courts ruled had committed misconduct.

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Statement from the Justice Department

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler issued the following statement on Wednesday in response to USA TODAY's investigation:

"A selective review of a handful of the many thousands of cases stretching as far back as 18 years ago does little to provide an accurate and representative picture of the honorable work done by federal prosecutors in courtrooms every day across this country. An internal review conducted by the Department last year found prosecutorial misconduct in a small fraction of the 90,000 cases brought annually, and when mistakes occur, we correct them as quickly and transparently as possible within the bounds of the law, which restricts what information we can release about personnel matters.

"In the past year and a half, the Office of Professional Responsibility has eliminated a four-year backlog of public reporting on allegations of misconduct against attorneys and disclosed more information about the types of allegations made than had been done in previous years. And while transparency remains a priority, there is no more important effort than preventing mistakes before they occur. That is why the attorney general has instituted a comprehensive training curriculum for all federal prosecutors, and made annual discovery training mandatory. We have taken unprecedented steps to ensure that prosecutors, agents and paralegals have the necessary training and resources to properly fulfill their discovery and ethics obligations."

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Prosecutors' conduct can tip justice scales

By Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy, USA TODAY

ORLANDO — The jurors who helped put Nino Lyons in jail for three years had every reason to think that he was a drug trafficker, and, until July, no reason to doubt that justice had been done.

For more than a week in 2001, the jurors listened to one witness after another, almost all of them prison inmates, describe how Lyons had sold them packages of cocaine. One said that Lyons, who ran clothing shops and nightclubs around Orlando, even tried to hire him to kill two drug suppliers.

But the federal prosecutors handling the case did not let the jury hear all the facts.

Instead, the prosecutors covered up evidence that could have discredited many of Lyons' accusers. They never revealed that a convict who claimed to have purchased hundreds of pounds of cocaine from Lyons struggled even to identify his photograph. And they hid the fact that prosecutors had promised to let others out of prison early in exchange for their cooperation.

Federal prosecutors are supposed to seek justice, not merely score convictions. But a USA TODAY investigation found that prosecutors repeatedly have violated that duty in courtrooms across the nation. The abuses have put innocent people in prison, set guilty people free and cost taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees and sanctions.

Judges have warned for decades that misconduct by prosecutors threatens the Constitution's promise of a fair trial. Congress in 1997 enacted a law aimed at ending such abuses.

Yet USA TODAY documented 201 criminal cases in the years that followed in which judges determined that Justice Department prosecutors — the nation's most elite and powerful law enforcement officials — themselves violated laws or ethics rules.

In case after case during that time, judges blasted prosecutors for "flagrant" or "outrageous" misconduct. They caught some prosecutors hiding evidence, found others lying to judges and juries, and said others had broken plea bargains.

Such abuses, intentional or not, doubtless infect no more than a small fraction of the tens of thousands of criminal cases filed in the nation's federal courts each year. But the transgressions USA TODAY identified were so serious that, in each case, judges threw out charges, overturned convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct. And each has the potential to tarnish the reputation of the prosecutors who do their jobs honorably.

In July, U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell did more than overturn Lyons' conviction: He declared that Lyons was innocent.

Neither the Justice Department nor the lead prosecutor in the Lyons case, Bruce Hinshelwood, would explain the events that cost Lyons his home, his businesses and nearly three years of freedom. The department investigated Hinshelwood but refused to say whether he was punished; records obtained by USA TODAY show that the agency regulating Florida lawyers ordered him to attend a one-day ethics workshop, scheduled for Friday.

Asked about Presnell's ruling exonerating Lyons, Hinshelwood said only, "It is of no concern to me."

The circumstances of Lyons' conviction did trouble Presnell, who oversaw his trial nine years ago. Presnell savaged the Justice Department in a written order for "a concerted campaign of prosecutorial abuse" by attorneys who, he wrote, covered up evidence and let felons lie to the jury.

Records from the Justice Department's internal ethics watchdogs show the agency has investigated a growing number of complaints by judges about misconduct they observed. In 2001, the department investigated 42 such complaints; last year, 61.

The department will not reveal how many of those prosecutors were punished because, it said, doing so would violate their privacy rights. USA TODAY, drawing on state bar records, identified only one federal prosecutor who was barred even temporarily from practicing law for misconduct during the past 12 years.

Even high-profile cases have been affected. Last year, a judge in Washington, D.C. — saying the department could not be trusted to investigate its own prosecutors — launched his own probe of the attorneys who handled the corruption trial of former Alaska senator Ted Stevens. After a jury found Stevens guilty, the department admitted that prosecutors had hidden evidence, then dropped the charges. (Stevens died in an August plane crash.)

Stevens' lawyers question how misconduct could have tainted such a closely watched case — and what that might mean for routine prosecutions. "It's a frightening thought and calls into question the generally accepted belief that our system of justice performs at a high level and yields just results," said Brendan Sullivan, Stevens' attorney.

Pattern of 'glaring misconduct'

Unlike local prosecutors, who often toil daily in crowded courts to untangle routine burglaries and homicides, Justice Department attorneys handle many of the nation's most complex and consequential crimes.

With help from legal experts and former prosecutors, USA TODAY spent six months examining federal prosecutors' work, reviewing legal databases, department records and tens of thousands of pages of court filings. Although the true extent of misconduct by prosecutors will likely never be known, the assessment is the most complete yet of the scope and impact of those violations.

USA TODAY found a pattern of "serious, glaring misconduct," said Pace University law professor Bennett Gershman, an expert on misconduct by prosecutors. "It's systemic now, and … the system is not able to control this type of behavior. There is no accountability."

He and Alexander Bunin, the chief federal public defender in Albany, N.Y., called the newspaper's findings "the tip of the iceberg" because many more cases are tainted by misconduct than are found. In many cases, misconduct is exposed only because of vigilant scrutiny by defense attorneys and judges.

However frequently it happens, the consequences go to the heart of the justice system's promise of fairness:

• Innocent people are punished. In Arizona, a woman spent eight years in prison for her conviction in a 2000 bank robbery because the prosecution never told her that another woman —who matched her description almost exactly — had been charged with robbing banks in the area. In Washington, D.C., a court in 2005 threw out murder charges against two men who had spent two decades in prison for a murder they didn't commit, in part because prosecutors hid evidence that two others could have committed the crime.

They were among 47 cases USA TODAY documented in which defendants were either exonerated or set free after the violations surfaced.

Among the consequences of misconduct, wrongful convictions are the most serious, said former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh. He said, "No civilized society should countenance such conduct or systems that failed to prevent it."

Even people who never spent a day in jail faced ruinous consequences: lost careers, lost savings and lost reputations. Last year, a federal appeals court wiped out Illinois businessman Charles Farinella's 2007 conviction for changing "best when purchased by" dates on bottles of salad dressing he sold to discount stores. The judges ruled that what he had done wasn't illegal and blasted lead prosecutor Juliet Sorensen for violations that robbed Farinella of a fair trial. Exoneration came too late to salvage his business or to help the 20 or so employees he had laid off.

"It's the United States government against one person," Farinella said in his first public comment on the case. "They beat you down because they are so powerful. They have trillions of dollars behind them. Even someone who's innocent doesn't have much of a chance."

• Guilty people go free or face less punishment. In Puerto Rico, a federal court blocked prosecutors from seeking the death penalty for a fatal robbery because they failed to turn over evidence; the defendant was sentenced to life in prison instead. In California, a double agent accused of sharing defense secrets with China was sentenced to probation instead of prison because prosecutors refused to let her lawyer talk to her FBI handler, a key witness. Dozens of other defendants — including drug dealers and bank robbers — left prison early because their trials were tainted.

• Taxpayers foot the bill. The Justice Department has paid nearly $5.3 million to reimburse the legal bills of defendants who were wrongly accused. It has spent far more to repeat trials for people whose convictions were thrown out because of misconduct, a process that can take years, although the full price tag is impossible to tally.

In one California case, for example, it took prosecutors four years and three trials to convict a man of tax fraud. Then an appeals court set aside his conviction because it said a prosecutor "sat silently as his witness lied."

The violations happened in almost every part of the nation, though USA TODAY found the most cases in federal courts in San Diego; Massachusetts; Washington, D.C.; and Puerto Rico. That pattern means misconduct is "not an isolated problem," said Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor and former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles.

Trial, jail and vindication

The American legal system puts enormous faith in juries: Give 12 men and women the facts, and they will separate the guilty from the innocent.

The Constitution, Congress and courts have set elaborate rules to ensure jurors get the facts and aren't swayed by emotion or fear. Rules are particularly exacting for prosecutors, as they act with government authority and their mistakes can put people in prison.

One of those rules, established by the Supreme Court nearly 50 years ago in a case called Brady v. Maryland, is that prosecutors must tell defendants about evidence that could help prove their innocence. Withholding that evidence is "reprehensible," the court later said.

Nonetheless, USA TODAY identified 86 cases in which judges found that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence to defendants. That's what happened to Nino Lyons.

Lyons, now 50, grew up in the public housing projects of Cocoa, Fla., outside Orlando; his father spent time in prison, and for several years, his mother raised him alone. Even so, Lyons thrived: He graduated from college and worked briefly at the nearby Kennedy Space Center. In the 1990s, he opened clothing stores and nightclubs in Cocoa and Orlando. He was vice president of the local NAACP chapter.

How Lyons also became a drug suspect is unclear. But five days before Christmas in 2000, police stormed his Rockledge house, searching for an illegal machine gun. They did not find a machine gun or any drugs. What they did find was suspicious: an assortment of legal guns and $185,000 in cash, some of it counterfeit. Lyons said he was saving for a down payment on an Orlando nightclub.

Within a year, prosecutors put together a procession of more than two dozen inmates willing to testify that Lyons was a major drug trafficker. Jurors convicted Lyons of almost every charge, including carjacking, selling counterfeit clothing and a drug conspiracy that could have put him in prison for life.

"With all the evidence they had brought forth in this trial, I didn't have any choice but to vote guilty on him," said one juror, Harold Newsome.

The evidence prosecutors hid from Newsome and the other jurors did not fully come to light until 2004, during Lyons' third year in jail. It surfaced only because of one line in a government sentencing report that hinted at undisclosed evidence. When it emerged, the Justice Department agreed to drop the drug charge against Lyons, and Presnell, the judge who oversaw the trial, threw out the rest.

It was a drastic step and meant Lyons could never be retried. Presnell wrote that he had no other option: "The Government's protracted course of misconduct," he wrote, "caused extraordinary prejudice to Lyons, exhibited disregard of the Government's duties, and demonstrated contempt for this court."

By then, Lyons had spent 1,003 days in a county jail north of Orlando. He was never sentenced, but remained locked up while courts sorted through the problems in his case. He saw his son and daughter, then in middle school, only through the thick glass windows of the visiting room, and spoke to them only via telephone.

His businesses folded while he was in jail. His wife, Debbie, was demoted from her job as principal of an elementary school, a move the school said was unrelated to the case. She sold the couple's house and took a night job tutoring the children of migrant farm workers to pay the bills.

"It was bad for me, but I didn't realize until I came home how bad it had been for my wife and my kids, people that really loved me," Lyons said.

Records show the Justice Department eventually paid $150,000 of Lyons' legal bills in a settlement that was never made public. It admitted in a court filing that prosecutors made "serious errors" in their handling of the case. The attorney who replaced Hinshelwood as the case dragged on, Lee Bentley, personally apologized to Lyons.

For Debbie Lyons, 51, it wasn't enough. "When they targeted him, they targeted me. They targeted my kids," she said. Prosecutors "don't have the courtesy to say, 'We're wrong, our agents were wrong, we pursued this case wrong. We know we lied, we know we withheld evidence.' "

Lyons said he's "thankful to God" that Presnell finally declared him innocent. But almost nine years after he was first found guilty, exoneration hasn't repaired the damage to his reputation.

In the six years since he was released from jail, he hasn't been able to find a regular job or even land an interview. Now he works part time for a church program in Orlando that finds mentors for kids whose parents are in jail. The grant that pays for the program will run out at the end of the month.

"Even if the president comes out tomorrow and says this man is 1,000% innocent, you're going to have somebody somewhere say, 'I'm not sure about that. I don't think the government would have did that if he was innocent,' " Lyons said.

'The scary part'

Sniffing out misconduct can be a matter of serendipity — or luck, as Lyons' attorneys discovered.

The evidence that eventually set Lyons free came to light only because of one sentence buried in a 40-page draft of a probation officer's sentencing report. Those drafts are dense and at times ignored, but this one offered a tantalizing clue: an account by one of Lyons' accusers, a federal inmate, that differed from his testimony during the trial.

That stuck out to Robert Berry, one of Lyons' attorneys, who wondered what else he hadn't been told. His digging led to hundreds of pages of other evidence prosecutors had never disclosed.

"If it wasn't for that one sentence, he would be in prison right now, probably for the rest of his life," Berry said. "The scary part is it probably does happen every day and nobody ever figures it out."

One reason violations may go undetected is that only a small fraction of criminal cases ever get the scrutiny of a trial, the process most likely to identify misconduct. Trials play a "very important" role, said former deputy attorney general David Ogden, because they force judges and attorneys to review a case in far more exacting detail.

The number of people charged with crimes in federal district courts has almost doubled over the past 15 years. Yet the number whose cases actually go to trial has fallen almost 30%, to about 3,500 last year, USA TODAY found. Last year, just four defendants out of 100 went to trial; the rest struck plea bargains that resolved their cases quickly, with far less scrutiny from judges.

"We really should be more concerned about the cases we don't know about," said Levenson, the Loyola professor. "Many of the types of misconduct you identified could happen every day, and we'd never know about it if defendants plead out."

Deliberate violations

In a justice system that prosecutes more than 60,000 people a year, mistakes are inevitable. But the violations USA TODAY documented go beyond everyday missteps. In the worst cases, say judges, former prosecutors and others, they happen because prosecutors deliberately cut corners to win.

"There are rogue prosecutors, often motivated by personal ambition or partisan reasons," said Thornburgh, who was attorney general under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Such people are uncommon, though, he added: "Most former federal prosecutors, like myself, are resentful of actions that bring discredit on the office."

Judges have seen those abuses, too. "Sometimes, you get inexperienced and unscrupulous assistant U.S. attorneys who don't care about the rules," said U.W. Clemon, the former chief judge in northern Alabama's federal courts.

How often prosecutors deliberately violate the rules is impossible to know. The Justice Department's internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility, insists it happens rarely. It reported that it completed more than 750 investigations over the past decade, and found intentional violations in just 68. The department would not identify the cases it concluded were marred by intentional violations, and removes from its public reports any details that could be used to identify the prosecutors involved.

State records, however, offer a glimpse into what can go wrong. Three years ago, two federal prosecutors in Illinois, each with more than a decade of experience, were ordered to answer to the state Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission for problems that almost torpedoed a drug case. The lawyers failed to turn over information to defense attorneys that could have discredited a key witness. That tactic, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit concluded, was "designed to deliberately mislead the court and defense counsel."

Both prosecutors told authorities that they knew the rules, and both admitted that they didn't turn over the evidence, according to a transcript of the hearing. One, Bradley Murphy, said he was counting on the witness to reveal the damaging information himself during his testimony. The other, John Campbell, apologized. "It's embarrassing, to say the least," he told the commission.

State records show that the Justice Department suspended both prosecutors for a day. Both also were censured by the Illinois Supreme Court.

They remain federal prosecutors.

Attorney General Eric Holder declined to be interviewed; earlier this year, he told judges that officials "must take seriously each and every lapse, no matter the cause." The head of the department's criminal division, Lanny Breuer, said, "Obviously, even one example of real misconduct is too many. … If you've engaged in misconduct, the response of the department has to be swift and strong."

In practice, however, the response — by the Justice Department and the state officials who oversee lawyers — has frequently been neither. Department records show that its internal investigations often take more than a year to complete, and usually find that prosecutors, at worst, made a mistake, even when judges who presided over the trials ruled that there was serious misconduct.

In one rare exception, the department in 2007 prosecuted one of its former attorneys, Richard Convertino, for obstructing justice in his handling of a Detroit terrorism case. He was acquitted, and he unsuccessfully accused the attorneys who prosecuted him of misconduct. The department called Convertino "unmanageable" in one court filing, but still kept its internal review of the case secret.

In the one case in which USA TODAY found that state officials suspended a federal prosecutor from practicing law, the punishment lasted only a year. In that case, Florida's Supreme Court found that Karen Schmid Cox had let a witness lie about her name during a trial, making it impossible for defense attorneys to check the witness's background. If they had, they would have found that the witness had been previously accused of lying to a judge and filing a false police report.

Pressures on prosecutors

In some cases, Justice Department records and court documents suggest that prosecutors broke the rules inadvertently, often because they were inexperienced or unsupervised.

Former prosecutors from offices across the nation insist that the Justice Department never put pressure on them to cut corners — "there wasn't any pervasive attitude of win-at-any-cost," said Rick Jancha, a former prosecutor in Orlando.

But there are other pressures. For one thing, prosecutors are taking on more cases than ever. In the mid-1990s, the offices had one attorney for every 14 defendants; last year, they had one attorney for every 28. Even though most of those cases end in plea bargains, the increase can be taxing, because prosecutors often are responsible not just for conducting trials but overseeing investigations.

And prosecutors put pressure on themselves. "They're the A+ students. They're not used to losing," Levenson said.

"Prosecutors think they're doing the Lord's work, and that they wear the white hat. When I was a prosecutor, I thought everything I did was right," said Jack Wolfe, a former federal prosecutor in Texas and now a defense lawyer. "So even if you got out of line, you could tell yourself that you didn't do it on purpose, or that it was for the greater good."

Beyond that, most federal prosecutors do their jobs with little day-to-day supervision, said Michael Seigel, the second-in-command of the U.S. attorney's office in Tampa from 1995 to 1999.

And, until last year, prosecutors were not required to get regular training in ethics such as their constitutional duty to share evidence with defendants. That training is important: Many of the legal rules prosecutors must follow are complex, and not everyone agrees on the boundary between aggressive lawyering and misconduct.

Last year, Ogden, Holder's second-in-command, headed a review of problems with prosecutors' failure to turn over evidence to defendants, the issue that ultimately undermined the Lyons case. It concluded that most violations were "not the product of people who intentionally set about to cheat but … more of a lack of training and a lack of resources," said Ogden, who left the department this year. That review prompted a new requirement that prosecutors get two hours of annual training in their duty to share evidence.

'Real sloppy and lazy'

Before Bruce Hinshelwood became a federal prosecutor, he tried murder cases and those involving other high-profile crimes as a state attorney. He headed the Justice Department's Jacksonville office, and was briefly second-in-command of the middle district surrounding Tampa. Later, he tried drug cases in Orlando. In all that time, there is no indication Hinshelwood was faulted for misconduct. The Lyons case changed that.

Hinshelwood's former boss, Paul Perez, became U.S. attorney in Tampa in 2002, shortly after Lyons' trial ended. When the case against Lyons fell apart, it was his job to figure out why.

Perez said in an interview that he personally never doubted that Lyons was guilty. He said the problems came down to inattention: Hinshelwood was "an experienced but very lazy prosecutor," but didn't break the rules on purpose. He was, Perez said, "real sloppy and lazy."

Judge Presnell drew harsher conclusions. In a 2004 order, he said the Justice Department's failures in the case could be explained, "at best, by its agents' sloppy investigative work or, at worst, by their knowing failure to meet constitutional duties." He later faulted prosecutors not just for failing to turn over evidence but for "brazenly" defying court orders and presenting witnesses who were "allowed, if not encouraged, to lie under oath."

Records from the Florida Bar, which regulates the state's lawyers, show that the Justice Department investigated Hinshelwood's handling of the Lyons case, a fact the department refused to confirm for fear of invading his privacy. The department completed its report in 2007 and referred its findings to the bar in 2009, a step Justice Department policies say it takes when it finds misconduct.

Despite Presnell's rebuke and its own investigation, there is no evidence that the Justice Department ever punished Hinshelwood. He continued prosecuting cases until he retired in February 2008 to open his own law practice in Orlando.

The Florida Bar investigated Hinshelwood last year — seven years after Presnell accused him of misconduct by name in a court order — but concluded that too much time had passed to take action for what happened at the trial. It let Hinshelwood resolve the complaint by paying $1,111.80 in costs and attending Friday's ethics workshop.

"That's the extent of it?" Lyons said.

The bar opened a second investigation of Hinshelwood in July after Presnell declared Lyons innocent, an uncommon step that officials would not explain publicly.

To Lyons, nothing the bar can do would be strong enough. Hinshelwood "should suffer or go to jail," Lyons said. "The justice system not only didn't work initially in my case, it's still not working. Bruce Hinshelwood has his pension. He still works every single day. His life is not miserable. I'm not saying mine is, but it's nothing like it was before."

McCoy reported from New York. Contributing: Rhyne Piggott.