DELAWARE

A study of criminal appeals from 1970 to the present revealed 151 Delaware criminal cases in which defendants alleged prosecutorial error or misconduct. In 22, judges ruled a prosecutor’s conduct prejudiced the defendant and reversed or remanded the conviction, sentence or indictment.

Of the cases in which judges ruled a prosecutor’s conduct prejudiced the defendant, 12 involved improper trial argument or witness examination, six were the result of the prosecution withholding evidence from the defense, three involved the denial of a speedy trial and one involved charging the defendant without probable cause.

With five years’ previous experience as a prosecutor in Wilmington, Charles Oberly III prosecuted Robert Hughes for the strangulation death of his wife.

Hughes, a math teacher at a local junior high, reported the murder on an early August morning in 1976. He said he found his wife’s body lying in their driveway with a cord around her neck. The next morning, police arrested Hughes for the murder. Eight days later, they released him because there was insufficient evidence to charge him with anything. Hughes returned to teaching and eventually moved to California with his two sons. Unexpectedly, two years later, without additional leads or evidence, a grand jury indicted Hughes for murder.

Oberly’s case against Hughes was based entirely on circumstantial evidence, and he never established a motive. During the trial, Oberly said that whoever killed Hughes’s wife would have had a lot of blood on their hands. A police officer had told Hughes, as a ruse, that tests showed blood on his hands, and Hughes had speculated about where it might have come from. Oberly had no other evidence that Hughes had any blood on his hands. Nonetheless, Oberly argued to the jury the state had “proved� that he did have blood on his hands. In 1981, the appellate court said this statement prejudiced Hughes and he deserved a new trial.

“To this day I am totally baffled by it,� Oberly told the Center. “In the defendant’s own statement he said he had blood on his hands, but the court thought we were tricking the jury to believe we had proved he had blood on his hands.�

The appellate court also wrote that several other comments and tactics were “highly prejudicial,� undoubtedly affected the jury’s verdict and deprived Hughes of a fair trial. One of the arguments involved Oberly referring to the defendant’s testimony as a lie. Oberly said he was trying to show the jury evidence that Hughes was lying.

“I don’t know why you can’t say that to the jury,� Oberly said. “I just think that is sanitizing things in a way that makes no sense to me.�

In 1982, Oberly retried Hughes and the jury again found him guilty of first-degree murder. Again, appellate judges reversed his conviction, this time because some jurors were biased and knew details about Hughes’ previous conviction. In the appellate court’s 1985 decision, justices said Oberly should have refrained from showing witnesses and the jury his handwritten notes from the first trial or he should have “stepped down as prosecutor.� After the second reversal, Hughes pleaded guilty to manslaughter instead of facing a third trial.

Oberly began his prosecuting career as a deputy attorney general in 1975. In 1976, he moved to the state prosecutor’s office, where he tried cases from 1976 to 1979. He then went back to serve as deputy attorney general from 1979 until 1982, when he took office as Delaware’s Attorney General. He was Delaware’s Attorney General from 1983 to 1995. He is now in local private practice as a criminal defense and civil litigation attorney.

During Oberly’s three years as a state prosecutor, at least four defendants he tried alleged prosecutorial misconduct on appeal. According to the Center’s study, the Hughes conviction was the only one reversed out of the four. In one of the cases that appellate judges upheld, the defendant later sued Oberly, alleging politically motivated, malicious prosecution. In 1989, the Supreme Court dismissed that suit due to prosecutorial immunity.

Oberly said Hughes’s case was the only one he personally tried that was reversed on appeal. But he pointed to several recent appellate opinions condemning prosecutors for improper trial arguments and tactics similar to the issues in the Hughes case. In 2002 alone, the state Supreme Court found prosecutorial misconduct in five appeals. In three, the court ruled the misconduct deprived the defendant of a fair trial and reversed the conviction.
  ¶ 12:57 AM