The Life-Destroying Danger of Prosecutorial Misconduct

Bobby Joe Maxwell, shown here in a 1979 photo, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in a series of attacks on homeless men by a killer dubbed “the Skid Row Stabber.” (Reed Saxon / AP)

For most prison inmates, news that charges against them have been dismissed is cause for celebration.

Not so for Bobby Joe Maxwell.

Last week, a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles dismissed Maxwell’s case. The trouble is, after spending nearly 40 years in custody for two counts of first-degree murder, Maxwell can’t appreciate his good fortune. In December, he suffered a massive heart attack and has been in a coma ever since. He is not expected to recover.

Maxwell’s prosecution is a story of justice delayed and justice denied, compounded by egregious official misconduct.

Now 68 years old, he was arrested in 1979 and charged with stabbing 10 homeless men to death in downtown Los Angeles. The local media at the time hyped him as a satanic serial killer, the “Skid Row Stabber.”

In all likelihood, he was neither, as I explained in a 2011 Truthdig column that profiled Maxwell and his appellate attorney, Verna Wefald of Pasadena. (Disclosure: Wefald is a friend and a former colleague from the California state public defender’s office, where we worked together in the early 1990s.)

Maxwell’s trial was delayed until 1984 by legal motions, including an unusual dispute over the publicity rights to his life story that his lawyers had…