Courtroom Participants' Professional Standards

Running head: Courtroom Participants' Professional Standards

When a person is convicted of a crime, he or she has the right to the normal procedures at a court. The hearing, defending, getting his own lawyer in order to defend the case he is in, or whether just to justify the crime that he may or may have not done. And in all these cases, honesty must be observed so as to serve true justice.

According to the Webster's Law Dictionary, Prosecution Misconduct is an illegal act or failing to act, on the part of a prosecutor, especially an attempt to sway the jury to wrongly convict a defendant or to impose a harsher than appropriate punishment. As a suggestion, if there is some unease about a case, just have to ask some knowledgeable person in order to support you with your case. After all, prosecutorial misconduct is classified as an unethical crime, since it involves the twisting of truth, which anybody should not be deprived of. Judicial misconduct is the conduct of a judge they are always in the public eye so they need to respect the people they work with and also the defendants in court.

A tale of prosecutorial misconduct is the Dale Helmig story. Dale was found guilty of his mother's murder and placed behind bars for up for 17 years battling to prove his innocence. Dale was sentenced to life without parole. According to the Midwestern Innocence Project (MIP), Assistant Attorney General Kenny Hulsoff's win-at-all-costs mentality led him to elicit testimony that he knew or should have known, was false. A state trooper was questioned by the Attorney. The trooper's testimony stated that Dale Helmig never said that he did not kill his mother. However, report of the trooper shown that Dale Helmig the trooper's own report verified that Dale Helmig struggled to say that he did not kill his mother. This time, a Sheriff made a testimony stating that he and his mother got into heated discussion, before she was murdered. However, there was an altercation, according to the police report; it showed that Dale's father was involved with the murder. Amidst numerous inconsistencies, a misled jury convicted Dale Helming. (MIP, 2012).

What the prosecutor did wrong was he did not use adequate evidence in the case or that Dale Helmig was not even in the area at the time or that he was never the one that had the fight with his mother. He also did not use the statement from the officer which was Helming's father who was in the house that it was a domestic and that they had the fight. Without that little bit of information, the judge, Warren McElwain, gave sentence of life and 18 years in prison. Sadly, this man will never get back the time wasted. There needs to be protections from the prosecutors from the consequences are misconducted.

By learning that prosecutorial misconduct is everywhere and that it seems like there is no way out of it, one may think that really, there is nothing we can do about it. But then you would be wrong. You would be surprise to know that no matter how strong these prosecutors may be, or how powerful they are, you still have a way of getting out of such misconduct. One is the direct constitutional action against those prosecutors who are inflicting thoughts and conspiring with the witnesses. Another is through demanding a pre-trial expert discovery or even filing a petition wherein you can ask for the hearing to be resumed after numerous days from filing such petition.

According, to legal dictionary "Prosecutors are absolutely immune for their actions during a trial or before a Grand Jury. However, during the investigatory phase, they are only granted qualified immunity. In Kalina v. Fletcher, (1997), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a prosecutor was not entitled to absolute immunity