Supreme Court

Billy Binion | 7.2.2024 5:01 PM

Consider the following hypothetical: You are jailed for two years as you await trial for murder. You are facing the death penalty. You have cancer, which relapsed during your incarceration without access to adequate treatment. And it turns out you were charged based on a false witness confession, which the local prosecutor allegedly destroyed evidence to obscure.

Now imagine suing that prosecutor and being told you have no recourse, because such government employees are entitled to absolute immunity.

This is the backdrop for Justice Sonia Sotomayor's opinion Tuesday arguing that the Supreme Court may need to reevaluate the confines of that legal doctrine—absolute prosecutorial immunity—which prevents victims of alleged prosecutorial misconduct from getting recourse in the vast majority of circumstances.

The case at issue centers around Nickie Miller, a Kentucky man whom a woman named Natasha Martin implicated in a bizarre murder plot after the government offered her a deal to avoid prison time. The primary issue: She almost immediately sought to recant that confession. Law enforcement wouldn't accept that. So she testified before a grand jury, and then tried to recant again, writing in jailhouse letters to another man she implicated that her statement came in........

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