Stephen Lemons | New Times

As Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery fights to keep Debra Milke behind bars pending a retrial on her overturned murder conviction, he also is fighting a proposed rule to the State Bar of Arizona that would require prosecutors to act on new evidence of a wrongful conviction.

For the past two years, the Arizona Justice Project has petitioned the Arizona Supreme Court to change the State Bar of Arizona’s ethics rules, adding a provision based on the American Bar Association’s Ethical Rule 3.8.

The ABA’s rule states that if a prosecutor discovers “new, credible, and material evidence” of a wrongful conviction, he or she must disclose the evidence to the defendant and “undertake further investigation or make reasonable efforts to cause an investigation, to determine whether the defendant was convicted of an offense that the defendant did not commit.”

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