A veteran criminal defense attorney has founded a reform organisation aimed at holding prosecutors accountable for misconduct and challenging the legal system’s failure to self-police.
Iris Eytan did not originally intend to become a criminal defense lawyer, having entered law school with ambitions to work as a mental health advocate.
Her early legal career focused on representing clients within psychiatric institutions, work that eventually followed those same clients into jails and prisons across the country.
That transition from constitutional mental health advocacy to full criminal defense became the foundation for decades of courtroom work on some deeply consequential cases.
Eytan describes two cases in particular as her bookends, each revealing in different ways the pressures and failures that can distort the justice system.
The first involved a jail deputy who was wrongfully accused of murdering his wife, a case that tested the limits of prosecutorial integrity and the burden placed on defendants.
The second was the Barry Morphew case, which Eytan says exposed how far some prosecutors are willing to go in order to protect a conviction.
Those experiences proved to be the catalyst for Eytan founding Protect Ethical Prosecutors, a reform campaign specifically focused on ending prosecutorial misconduct within the American legal system.
The organisation addresses what Eytan and others in the field describe as a serious and systemic problem, one compounded by the near-total immunity prosecutors enjoy from civil litigation.
Because prosecutors cannot typically be sued in civil court for misconduct, the legal profession has been left to rely on self-policing mechanisms that critics argue are inadequate and rarely enforced.
The campaign raises fundamental questions about whether bar associations and disciplinary bodies are doing enough to sanction prosecutors who suppress evidence, pursue weak cases, or act in bad faith.
Prosecutorial misconduct has long been identified as a leading contributor to wrongful convictions, yet accountability measures have remained limited and inconsistently applied across different jurisdictions.
Protect Ethical Prosecutors aims to shift that dynamic by pushing for structural reforms that create real consequences for misconduct, rather than leaving victims of injustice without meaningful recourse.
Eytan’s background, spanning mental health law and high-profile criminal defense, gives her a distinctive vantage point from which to challenge a system that has resisted reform for decades.