Bad boys: a rogue's gallery of misbehaving prosecutors, plus three worth praising.

• Author: Balko, Radley

You might think that putting an innocent person in prison for a major crime like rape or murder would end or at least impede a prosecutor's career. But prosecutors are rarely sanctioned for mistakes, even when their misconduct is egregious. In fact, they are often re-elected, promoted to judge, or encouraged to run for political office. Sometimes they even owe these successes to the publicity they get from high-profile convictions of people who turned out to be innocent. Here are some of the worst cases of prosecutors who put more than one innocent person in prison but suffered no significant professional consequences.

The Death Row Gambler

Forrest Allgood, district attorney for four Mississippi counties

Four people Forrest Allgood has convicted of murder were later set free. Two of them served time on death row.

One was Sabrina Buffer, an 18-year-old mentally retarded woman Allgood convicted of killing her infant son in 1990. Buffer was retried in 1995 after the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that Allgood had committed misconduct when he told jurors that Buffer's refusal to take the stand in her own defense was an indication of her guilt. In the retrial, the medical examiner that Allgood had used the first time around admitted to making some key mistakes, and outside examiners testified that Buffer's child likely died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or kidney disease. Buffer was acquitted and released from prison.

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Another Allgood victim was Tyler Edmonds. In Edmonds' 2007 trial, Allgood posited that the defendant and his sister, Kristi Fulgham, had teamed up to kill Fulgham's husband 13 years earlier. The duo, he argued, had waited until the man was asleep and then simultaneously pulled the trigger. At trial, Allgood called on controversial medical examiner Steven Hayne, who preposterously claimed that he could tell by the bullet wounds in the victim's body that two people had held the gun. On review, the Mississippi Supreme Court threw out Hayne's testimony and ordered a new trial. In 2008 Edmonds was retried, acquitted, and released. Kristi Fulgham was convicted in a separate trial and is still on death row.

In his 1995 prosecution of Kennedy Brewer, Allgood again solicited testimony from Hayne, this time accompanied by Hayne's longtime sidekick, the disgraced bite mark specialist Michael West. West testified that he found bite marks on a 3-year-old murder victim that could only have been made by Brewer's teeth. Based largely on that testimony, Brewer was convicted of raping and killing Christine Jackson, his girlfriend's daughter, and sentenced to death. After the conviction, Allgood attempted to have the biological evidence from the case destroyed. Brewer's lawyer objected and managed to preserve it.

A decade later, more-advanced DNA testing determined that there was semen from two men inside of Jackson, and neither of them was Kennedy Brewer. The state Supreme Court ordered a new trial. Despite the test results, Allgood planned to prosecute Brewer again. When The New York Times asked him why he hadn't bothered checking the crime scene DNA against the state's DNA database, Allgood replied hat the state doesn't have such a database. This came as a surprise to the man who had been running it.

Allgood's decision to retry Brewer and his opposition to checking the crime scene evidence against the state DNA database kept Brewer in prison for another six years. When the DNA was finally checked, it revealed...