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

Ricardo Aldape Guerra, sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of a Houston police officer, is freed after fourteen years on death row when a federal judge finds that Guerra was the victim of an outrageous misconduct. The judge calls police "merchants of chaos" bent on revenge and on threatening witnesses into lying. The court also accused prosecutors of manipulating evidence to falsley convict Aldape, when all the physical evidence pointed to another man killed in a shootout with police. Rather than retry Aldape, the authorities ultimately dropped the case. The judge wrote, "But for the conduct of the police officers and the prosecutors, either [Aldape] would not have been charged with this offense or the trial would have resulted in an acquittal." Prosecutorial misconduct cited by the judge included threatening and intimidating witnesses, most of whom were children, and hiding evidence of Aldape's innocence while lying in closing arguments about evidence of his guilt. The court asserted that the prosecutor's "misconduct was designed to obtain a conviction and another 'notch in their guns' despite the overwhelming evidence that [another man] was the killer."