Edition: U.S. / Global

Trial and Error

By Laura Mansnerus
Published: May 9, 1999


A Town's Terror,

a Prosecutor's Power,

a Betrayal of Innocence.

By Edward Humes.

491 pp. New York:

Simon & Schuster. $26.

Patrick Dunn is a nervous man in his 60's who plods to work in the library and administrative offices at Corcoran State Prison in California. He is serving a life sentence, with no possibility of parole, for the murder of his wife. After several failed appeals, he asked the private investigator who had helped him, ''I'm going to die here, aren't I?'' and she had no good answer.

Dunn was not exactly framed by the system, but he was trapped by it, because he lived in a county that convicted lots of innocent people. Edward Humes, a journalist and the author of a richly detailed book on the juvenile courts, shows how this is possible anywhere the benefit of the doubt is allowed to shift from defendant to prosecution.

Alexandra and Patrick Dunn were a middle-aged couple, both a bit eccentric, both heavy drinkers, who did well in Bakersfield, Calif. Pat, a former school principal, had run a successful mortgage-foreclosure business, and his wife, called Sandy, had several million dollars of her own from real estate investments. They were putting their financial affairs in order, setting up a trust in both their names for Sandy's assets, when she disappeared on the night of June 30, 1992.

That, plus a lot of suspicions, was all the Kern County sheriff's department had when her body was found weeks later in the desert. No physical evidence connected Pat to the crime. But then a witness appeared -- a heroin addict who said he had seen Pat Dunn carrying a body from his house in the early hours of July 1 and offered testimony for a deal to avoid a prison sentence for grand theft. Friends testified that the Dunns had fought bitterly and Sandy had threatened divorce. Altogether, as Humes tells it, the investigation and trial were a cascade of practically unbelievable misstatements, awful coincidences and slip-ups by the defense.

There is more, too, that Humes has to say about Kern County, which not so incidentally brought the nation the first of the 1980's child-molestation rings, fiercely prosecuted and later found to be mostly nonexistent. Most of the 56 more or less ordinary adults charged in Bakersfield were eventually cleared, and several unrelated murder convictions were overturned, but even as the District Attorney's office fell apart, it was no help to Pat Dunn.

These cases raise questions about when a prosecutor's sleight of hand or careful omission amounts to misconduct. Prosecutors must turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. What of evidence they should know about but don't? Pat Dunn's prosecutor never knew that his star witness had offered testimony -- any testimony -- weeks before the murder occurred. Almost any unintentional omission short of a smoking gun is treated by appellate courts as ''harmless error.'' How does a defendant prove that the witness interview or license-plate check that might have saved him was concealed, not just shuffled aside?

These cases also raise questions about the truth-telling ritual called a trial. Facts on paper are flimsy enough. At a trial they are downright evanescent, shimmering briefly before jurors cut off from context. And yet, after the trial, the story is all but inviolate; an appeals court weighs only whether the trial judge made mistakes in applying the law. So, in the Dunn case, the main prosecution witness told an incriminating story and the jury believed it. Several defense witnesses poked large holes in it, but the jury disbelieved them or did not know what they were saying, or the import of it.

Sometimes, all the more frequently now as one case after another has shaken confidence in the police and prosecutors, the system's misjudgments are undone. But many more people with compelling stories are found guilty more or less irrevocably, failing to excite new defense lawyers, failing to produce the striking new evidence that is required for any rehearing, failing even to find out how the cases against them were put together. ''Mean Justice'' is an intricate brief for one of them.