California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from Pitts v. County of Kern, 17 Cal.4th 340, 70 Cal.Rptr.2d 823, 949 P.2d 920 (Cal. 1998):
Plaintiffs were convicted in 1985 of multiple counts of sexual abuse of young children and were each sentenced to hundreds of years in prison. In [17 Cal.4th 367] 1990, after they had served several years in state prison, their convictions were overturned on appeal because of numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct and errors on the part of the trial judge. (People v. Pitts (1990) 223 Cal.App.3d 606, 273 Cal.Rptr. 757.) In 1991, the district attorney dismissed the case against plaintiffs. By 1994, all of the original child witnesses who had testified recanted and claimed to have been forced to falsely testify. After the dismissal, plaintiffs filed suit against the County of Kern, the sheriff, the district attorney and several members of the district attorney's office. The focus of the complaint was on the alleged misconduct of some of the deputy district attorneys and an investigator with the district attorney's office in coercing false testimony from children, as well as suppressing and failing to reveal exculpatory
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