Good QI decision from CA10 last Friday. The facts, as the court said, shock the conscience: A prosecutor intentionally fed a medical examiner false info to get a suicide reclassified as a homicide, & then used that to put plaintiff behind bars.
No QI. 1/ ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/19/19…
No QI. 1/ ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/19/19…
Just as good as the no-QI result is how the court got there. First, it declined to engage in a "scavenger hunt for prior cases with precisely the same facts": /2
Better yet, the court held that this was a Hope v. Pelzer / Taylor v. Riojas "obvious" QI case: "Any reasonable prosecutor [should] understand that providing a medical examiner fabricated evidence & then putting him on the stand to testify [falsely] offends the Constitution." 3/
Before Taylor, Hope was the only case in which SCOTUS had held that showing an "obvious" violation can defeat QI. That was in 2002. People thought Hope was dead. Last year, Taylor brought it back to life. We may be beginning to see an ever-so-slightly more sane QI jurisprudence.
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