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> In 1955 San Antonio Cabinetmaker Alvaro Alcorta was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. At the trial, Alcorta vainly claimed that he had come upon his wife and one Natividad Castilleja kissing in a car; Alcorta admitted that he then stabbed his wife to death in a fit of passion, a crime punishable in Texas by no more than five years in prison. For the prosecution, Castilleja blandly testified that he had only a platonic relationship with Mrs. Alcorta. In 1957, after Alcorta had faced execution eleven times, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction on the ground that Castilleja had actually been Mrs. Alcorta's "lover and paramour"—a vital fact of which Prosecutor Hubert W. Green Jr. was fully aware. In 1958 Green was named Texas' Outstanding Prosecutor.
There is a federal criminal law (Section 242, Title 18, U.S. Code) that carries a one-year sentence for public officials who willfully deny a person's constitutional rights. But no one has ever invoked it against prosecutors. There is a federal civil law (Section 1983, Title 42) that permits money damages for the same injury. Yet as elected officials and court officers, prosecutors are presumably immune to such civil suits. Not in living memory has any American prosecutor ever been punished in any way for falsifying or misrepresenting evidence.