Excerpted from "Mean Justice" by Edward Humes, Pocket Star Books, 1999.

Titus Lee Brown is freed from his 1984 murder conviction and life prison sentence when it is revealed that the Los Angeles assistant district attorney on his case knowingly introduced false evidence linking Brown to a murder-robbery. Contrary to what she told the defense, judge and jury, the prosecutor knew that the property allegedly stolen by Brown actually had been found on the victim's body by the coroner, who returned it to the victim's family. The case shows just how hard it can be to win a new trial, even when such prosecutorial misconduct occurs: The California Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, though it condemned the prosecutor's actions; the state supreme court not only refused to take Brown's side, it ordered the lower court's opinion "depublished", so as to spare the prosecutor any embarrassment. The case had to go all the way up to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals - one rung below the Supreme Court - before Brown received a new trial. The appeals court wrote: "The prosecutor's actions in this case are intolerable. Possessed of knowledge that destroyed her theory of the case, the prosecutor had a duty not to mislead the jury. Instead, she kept the facts secret ... and then presented testimony in such a way as to suggest the opposite of what she alone knew to be true ... Such conduct perverts the adversarial system and endangers its ability to produce just results."