Courtroom Participant's Professional Standards

Courtroom Participant's Professional Standards

Dexter Smith

CJA/224

July 10, 2012

Rodney Sprauve

Courtroom Participant's Professional Standards

There are several jobs inside the courtroom, and there are times when those jobs are being abused. I will be discussing the prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective assistant by criminal defense counsel, judicial misconduct, and I will be discussing a real life situation. There are several questions that I will be answering, and they are how does immunity protect the prosecutor from the consequences of his or her malpractice?

Strickland vs. Washington in ch.10 of Courts and Criminal Justice in America is an example of the questions of what did the criminal defense attorney do wrong. How does the action hook and the discrimination hook of the Strickland standard relate to this example?

How does the malpractice or the inadequacy of the courtroom colleagues manifest or hinder the crime control model of criminal justice? How does the malpractice or uselessness of the courtroom associates exhibit or hinder the due process of the criminal justice system?

Prosecutorial misconduct is an illicit attempt to influence the jury to unjustly convict a defendant or attempt to have the defendant charged with a more severe infliction that may not be suitable due to the criminal action. Everyday someone is wrongfully convicted. Some of the people are held for years before having their case heard by the courts.

The ineffective assistance by defense counsel is when the defendant's attorney's services are ineffective leading to their attorney violating the Sixth Amendment. Strickland vs. Washington (1984) is defined by the Supreme Court as being ineffective assistance of counsel.

In order to prove ineffective assistance, the defendant must demonstrate that his or her counselor's actions were ineffective because the attorney made a lot of errors. Secondly, the defendant must demonstrate that the attorney's errors are bias to the defendant's case. Bios means the trial would have had dissimilar conclusions due to the fact that if the attorney would not have made errors that altered the outcome of the sentencing.

Judicial misconduct is the conduct of a judge who is always the center of public attention so a judge needs to show respect to the people they work among.

Dale Helmig's story is a real life story on prosecutorial misconduct. Dale Helmig was convicted of murdering his mother. Mr. Helmig was imprisoned for 17 years all while fighting to prove his innocence he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Assistant Attorney Kenny Hulsoff's win no matter the cost attitude led him to coerce statements that he knew, or at some point should have known was not true. Hulsoff questioned a state officer who gave a statement under oath Mr. Helmig never say that he did not kill his mother; however, the officer's report proves that Helmig argued that he did not kill his mother. In reaction to Hulsoff's questions, Sheriff Fowler gives testimony that Mr. Helmig had an altercation with his mother right before her death. Still the police report showed Dale Helmig's father Ted Helmig, was the one involved in the dispute. Surrounded by numerous deviations, misguided jurors convicted Mr. Helmig. The things the district