When the average person gets caught breaking the law, the California criminal justice system punishes them, often without mercy. But what happens when a California prosecutor breaks the law and puts an innocent person behind bars? Not a whole lot, thanks in large part to the fact that they enjoy absolute immunity from civil liability for their actions in court.

If you grant someone immunity for their actions, it should come as no surprise that they will flout the rules with impunity. And that's what California prosecutors have done: between 1997 and 2009, judges explicitly found prosecutors engaged in misconduct 707 times, with 67 prosecutors engaging in it more than once. Yet during that period, just six were disciplined by the California State Bar, according to data compiled by the Veritas Initiative at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

In a particularly galling example, one man, Mark Sodersten, spent 22 years behind bars for a murder he didn't commit, convicted only because the deputy district attorney in the case, Phillip Cline, withheld an interview with a witness that would have exonerated him. But despite a court finding that the case raised "the most feared aspect of our system -- that an innocent man might be convicted," Cline has faced no repercussions. In fact, he's moved up in the world, becoming Tulare County's District Attorney.

California's criminal justice system is broken. And as founder of the Veritas Initiative Kathleen Ridolfi told Change.org, the problem of prosecutorial misconduct is "systemic." Tell California lawmakers to do away with prosecutors' absolute immunity. The law must apply to everyone, and there must be consequences for misconduct that jails the innocent and lets the guilty go free.

Photo Credit: erjkprunczyk