While watching Happy Face this week, I was once again reminded that justice often feels lopsided, delayed, or denied. Without spoiling the episode, I also found myself frequently rolling my eyes at the show’s fictional Texas prosecutor.
“Typical,” I mumbled, as the show’s prosecutor spent several episodes trying to win a wrongful conviction case at any cost to save face. It doesn’t matter where you go, reality or fiction, this mentality is baked into the system.
Of course, John Oliver has weighed in on this before:
But believe it or not, the role of a prosecutor is not to win at all costs; it’s to seek justice.
In practice, however, the American legal system often rewards convictions rather than truth, power over accountability. And that’s only one reason why prosecutors so rarely admit when they’re wrong; even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
The Culture of Conviction
Prosecutors wield enormous power. They decide who to charge, what to charge them with, whether to offer a plea deal, and what sentence to recommend. Careers are built entirely around conviction rates. Promotions, political aspirations, and public reputation are often tied to “wins,” not necessarily outcomes that reflect the truth. This conviction-focused culture leaves little room for vulnerability, much less public acknowledgment of mistakes.
Admitting Wrongdoing = Risking Everything
Admitting a mistake, especially one that may have deprived someone of their freedom or life, can be legally and politically dangerous. It opens the door to lawsuits, public backlash, and disciplinary consequences. It may also require acknowledging misconduct by police, forensic experts, or even the prosecutor themselves. In some cases, prosecutors who’ve pursued wrongful convictions have gone on to become judges or elected officials. So reversing course could be seen as unraveling their perceived legacy. Obviously this is flawed, considering the system is supposed to be focused on truth and justice.
The American System Doesn’t Encourage Accountability
Even when innocence is proven, prosecutors often fight to preserve the original conviction.
- Appeals are opposed.
- Requests for retrials are denied.
- Evidence of misconduct is buried under claims of “harmless error.”
Rarely do prosecutors face real consequences for misconduct, even when it’s willful (aka, malicious prosecution).
Wanna know how rare? The Innocence Project can only name ONE prosecutor who served jail time for their role in a wrongful conviction. ONE.
It was Williamson County, Texas Prosecutor Ken Anderson. He served a whole whopping 5 days of a jail sentence for withholding evidence, violating the Brady Rule.
What happened to Ken Anderson became national news mostly because these kinds of consequences are so rarely imposed on prosecutors
Nina Morrison, Senior Litigation Counsel, Innocence Project
It’s most definitely happened here in Michigan:
- Clinton County Prosecutor Tony Spagnuolo’s office (not him personally) was fined $1,200 for withholding evidence in a rape case.
- Oakland County Prosecutor overstepped and spent over $100,000 in taxpayer funds to influence the media and get onto reality tv.
- Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office faced zero consequences for destroying evidence that could have helped exonerate people, and failed to share evidence that could have exonerated a man who has served time behind bars for 20 years.
Coming full circle, it is very much like what “Happy Face” portayed on its latest episode.
This is probably why there is first, an attorney shortage and second, lawyers are highly susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse and depression, with nearly 45% suffering from depression at some point and 12% considering suicide.
People don’t want to be part of a purposefully broken system, and when they have to, it’s mentally debilitating.
The Human Cost of Wrongful Convictions
Every wrongful conviction is a human tragedy. Period.
According to the National Institute of Justice, there are two types of wrongful convictions:
- A person is factually innocent of the charges
- There were procedural errors that violated a person’s rights.
And guess what? The way the system works right now, whether anyone will admit it or not (because for reasons above we know they won’t), many cases have procedural errors that will be thrown in the bucket as “harmless error.” The problem is most people are unaware of this because the system does such a good job at covering this fact up.
The conventional approach to harmless error review prohibits
Policing Procedural Error in the Lower Courts
reversal of a defendant’s conviction or sentence, even when the law was violated during proceedings in the lower court, unless that violation influenced the outcome.
Consequences of Procedural Error
The consequences of procedural error can be heavy.
Families are torn apart. Years, sometimes even decades, of someone’s life are taken, and then people wonder why impacted individuals get so frustrated or live in fear.
Um… duh.
And when wrongful convictions are overturned, the language used is passive: “New evidence came to light,” or “the court reversed the conviction” it won’t be, “we got it wrong.”
Because the hardest part is it’s never just the one person; it’s a trickle down effect to family and community members, resulting in a cascading effect of people losing trust in a system that claims to serve justice but really just protects its own. That’s how you can make it through an entire state’s complaint process and never get to accountability; because it’s a ton of work, and mostly, a nightmare to get to the other side and win.
The process creates collateral consequences and additional victims, and around and around we go.
We Need a Cultural Shift
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be this way.
Shocking, I know.
Prosecutors’ offices should have conviction integrity units that are truly independent, with the power to reexamine cases and publicly acknowledge error without fear.
We need legal and ethical standards that reward transparency, and discourage or perhaps even punish outright denial and covering one’s tracks, sneakily moving around problematic staff rather than discourage bad actors.
Most importantly, we need to stop treating wrongful convictions as rare flukes. They are symptoms of a system that intentionally resists self-reflection.
Admitting you were wrong is not weakness, that’s called integrity. And until prosecutors are willing to embrace that, justice will remain elusive for too many.
