Federal Court Throws Out Murder Conviction Evan Griffith over Extreme Nifong-like Prosecutorial Misconduct and Blatant Judicial Errors

I ask the United States Attorney, now do you not see the continued denial of civil rights in the Circuit Court of Cook County that amounts to a RICO violation as the Circuit Court of Cook County sure appears to act as a criminal enterprise, not only stealing money with constitutionally excessive bails where the Clerk keeps 10%, setting bail without due process, but also with judges that are encouraged to continue to ignore the Constitution and violate the Bill of Rights in a blatant and intentional manner as a matter of policy and procedure!

Judge John Moran exhibited Gross Judicial Error/Misconduct bordering on felony violation of civil rights under color of law .

Prosecutorial Misconduct of Asst. State’s Attorney Laura Morask clearly amounts to her now legendary and continued disdain for the Constitution and Due Process and intentional felony violation of civil rights under color of law. She has a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct noted by higher courts and Cook County State's Attorney Richard Divine seems to have made this a policy and practice of his office in blatant and intential disregard of the Bill of Rights!

Evan Griffith was 16 years old in 1985 when he had run away from home because of constant extreme physical, emotional, and sexual abuse since age eight. He was subject to intense symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder where he would essentially relieve these horrible instances of abuse in an altered state of consciousness. He was also subject, as a result, to extreme symptoms of acute stress disorder where he would even have memory lapses (amnesia) as to what he was doing, along with “dissociative reaction” in which behavior can become automatic and repetitive, which was triggered by similar circumstances to the threatening situations he suffered at home (including men who looked like his father and were sexually abusing him or who threatened his life.)

In 1985 after being sexually abused and threatened with death by his abuser, who was allowing this homeless, abused, and hopeless youth to sleep in his home, Evan decided to get back at the abuse by stealing money from his safe. He used a hammer to try and break in while the abuse was gone. The abuser suddenly interrupted Evan and because the abuser looked like Evan’s father and threatened his life, Evan hit him with a hammer to try to subdue this abuser who was 220 lbs compared to Evan’s 120 lb frame. Evan went into a dissociative amnesic state and doesn’t remember much of the event except hitting him with a hammer and “waking up” with blood on his hand and a knife in his hand and then stealing $124 out of the unconscious abuser’s pocket.

Evan was tried twice, first after pleading guilty he was sentenced to 35 years, but the conviction overturned because the guilty plea was not voluntary. Then he was convicted at a new trial after pleading not guilty and sentenced to life without parole by Dishonorable Judge John Moran. The Honorable Federal District Court Judge Elaine E. Bucklo, in an act of proper judicial conduct that upholds the constitution, granted Evan’s Petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus on November 12, 2008, thus vacating the conviction.

The reason she vacated the conviction which means that Evan cannot be retried is because the extreme prosecutorial misconduct where the prosecutor (and she specifically stated that these following examples were illustrative not exhaustive and therefore only represent a portion of the unethical venom that permeated the trial):

· lied to the court,
· consistently and repeatedly disobeyed court orders,
· misused evidence,
· denigrated the defense witnesses without basis by saying the psychiatrist who described the above was “ridiculous” and that he “couldn’t answer a straight yes or no in 50 words . . ; He couldn’t answer a straight yes or no in 50 words . . . . Because he is getting paid by the word,”
· denigrated other witnesses as “ridiculous,” “a joke,” “a slime ball,” and “pathetic,” and
· emotionally inflamed the jury with false statements such as that Evan was a “walking barbecue tong”, a “grenade in a baby carriage,” a “deranged Energizer bunny,” and “oh my God, look at the cute little baby. Goochi, goochi, goochi, goochi.” And he goes “boom” and explodes in your face, as well as claiming –
· repeatedly during closing that acquittal would give Evan a “license to kill.”

Hon. Judge Bucklo rightfully stated that the prosecutor’s unprofessional conduct “called into question the State’s commitment to fair and just enforcement of the law.” She said that:

[T]he prosecutor’s dehumanizing litany during rebuttal, which compared Evan to “a deranged energizer bunny,” a “walking barbecue tongs,” and finally, a “grenade in a baby carriage,” was leveraged by the misuse of the 1990 crime evidence, the admission of which she had obtained on false premises, and her use of which far exceeded even those premises. Moreover, her repeated closing references to a “license to kill,” coupled with her exaggerated speculation about the violent acts Mr. Griffith would commit in the future (such as killing car mechanics), smack of the suggestion that the jury would be to blame for future crimes if it credited Mr. Griffith’s defense and decline to convict him of first degree murder.

She also said:

[T]he prosecutor’s toxic rebuttal argument fed off of the misuse of improper propensity evidence. The effect was inherently prejudicial, since it posed ‘an unacceptable risk . . . of impermissible factors coming into play.’ U.S. v. Mannie 509 F.3d 851, 857 (7th Cir. 2007) (indirectly quoting Estelle v. Williams, 425 U.S. 501, 505 (1976), and citing, inter alia, Sheppard v. Maxwell, U.S. 333 (1966)).

Then she said: “The trial court’s general cautionary instruction reminding the jurors that attorney argument is not evidence was insufficient to defuse this prejudice.”

Finally, Hon. Judge Bucklo said that:

The prosecution’s dogged focus on the improper theme of Mr. Griffith’s “propensity to kill with a knife,” . . . shaped the course of the proceedings and permeated the entire atmosphere of the trial. Such a climate is inherently and fundamentally unfair. “It is axiomatic in our system of justice that an individual is entitled to a fair trial-not a perfect one. Nevertheless, the distance between the concepts of fair and perfect cannot be so great as to render the former meaningless.” Mannie, 509 F.3d at 85.

Hon. Judge Bucklo’s final conclusion, in addition to the fact that there was deliberate and repeated prosecutorial misconduct was:

For these reasons, I find that the prosecutor’s misconduct, including at least her improper closing arguments, her deliberate deception to win the admission of highly prejudicial evidence, and her subsequent misuse of that evidence during the trial “so infected the trial with unfairness as to make the resulting conviction a denial of due process.” Darden, 477 U.S. at 181. [Darden v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 168 (1986)]

I applaud the ruling of Hon. Judge Bucklo for upholding the principles of the Bill of Rights and calling the kettle black. Now I only wish that Dishonorable Judge Moran would be disciplined by the dysfunctional land useless black hole covering up judicial misconduct known as the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board, and removed from the bench for his now pattern of gross abuse of judicial discretion and misconduct in violating his oath of office and blatantly and openly failing to uphold the constitution and citizen’s rights to due process. I also hope that the rabid, dishonorable, and unethical Assistant State’s Attorney Laura Morask suffers the same fate as Mr. Nifong in North Carolina in losing her law license for extreme and unethical behavior that jeopardizes the justice system.

It is particularly sad and outrageous to note that in June 2001 State’s Attorney Richard Divine personally argued before the Illinois Appellate Court First District that there is not a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct in his office. This is despite the fact that the Appellate Court ruled that there was an extreme pattern of prosecutorial misconduct by ASA Morask in the case, despite the fact they unethically and illegally upheld the conviction because they ruled this misconduct to be harmless. ASA Morask has been repeatedly cited by higher courts as committing prosecutorial misconduct.

One has to conclude that the Attorney Regulatory Commission in Illinois (ARDC) is such an ineffective black hole that circular files complaints about prosecutors that they can be regarded as a joke, a bad one as they actively engage in cover-up and failure to prosecute blatant and repeated prosecutorial misconduct.

Of NOTE: the appeal pending in my conviction for battery of an officer (despite the fact that my physicians testified that my physical disabilities prevented me from committing this alleged crime of which I am innocent) illustrates abundantly another example of a dishonest judge who refuses to follow the Bill of Rights due process requirements (Dishonorable Judge Joseph Kazmierski) and other Nifong-like prosecutor (ASAs Anthony Dalkin and John Maher) who feel they are above the law and can denigrate witnesses without basis, misstate the law to the jury, misuse evidence, withhold exculpatory evidence, and improperly inflame the passions of the jury with false statements, innuendo, and defamation of the defendant without basis based on the lies that they make by illegally testifying in closing arguments.