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

In Walker vs. City of New York, a convicted murderer won his freedom after two decades when it was finally proven that prosecutors had pursued the defendant's conviction and continued imprisonment even though they were aware of his probable innocence, and lied and concealed evidence in the process. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, in freeing the man, criticized the entire chain of command at the local district attorney's office, finding the agency had failed to train trail attorneys "in such basic norms of human conduct as the duty not to lie or persecute the innocent."