Because Peggy Jo Tallas was so secretive, never telling one friend about another, hiding even the most simple details about her life from her own family, I wrote the story convinced that, as soon as it was published, I would hear from people who had known her. I thought they would tell me that I had missed certain key insights into her personality that would have helped me understand why she robbed banks. But for weeks, there was nothing. Then, six months after the article was published, I received a two-sentence letter, obviously written by an elderly person: ' 'Mr. Hollandsworth-the Peggy Jo I knew was a gentle, loving woman who devoted her life to her mother. If the police knew her like I did, I think they would have let her keep driving."

Jeffrey Toobin : Killer Instincts

from The New Yorker

Many American courthouses have a Kenneth Peasley. For years, he was the most feared prosecutor in Arizona 's Pima County, which includes Tucson. He was widely known as the government lawyer who wouldn't plea-bargain, who left his adversaries seething, and who almost always won. When defense lawyers got together, they would talk about how Peasley had stuck his finger in their clients' faces, or how he wouldn't greet them in the hallway. "The defense lawyers hated him," Howard Hantman, a Pima County Superior Court judge, said."But I always thought that was because he was so good. Watching Ken was like watching great theatre. He had an instinct for the jugular like no prosecutor I ever saw."

Peasley was more than just a local phenomenon. From 1978 until last year, he tried more than two hundred felony cases, including a hundred and forty homicides, and handled about sixty capital cases. He gave lectures around the country about how to try murder cases, and he won national awards. Steve Neely, who, as the county attorney, was Peasley's boss for eighteen years, said,"He was absolutely the most effective prosecutorial performer that I have ever seen or heard of." Peasley, a two-time state prosecutor of the year, is personally responsible for a tenth of the prisoners on Arizona 's death row.

Last year, Peasley acquired another distinction: he was disbarred for intentionally presenting false evidence in death-penalty cases- something that had never before happened to an American prosecutor. In a 1992 triple-murder case, Peasley introduced testimony that he knew to be false; three men were convicted and sentenced to die. Peasley was convinced that the three were guilty, but he also believed that the evidence needed a push.

During the years of Peasley's rise and fall, the exoneration of prisoners on America 's death rows has become increasingly common. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since the mid-nineteen-seventies a hundred and seventeen death-row inmates have been released. Defense lawyers, often relying on DNA testing, have shown repeatedly how shoddy crime-lab work, lying informants, and mistaken eyewitness identifications, among other factors, led to unjust convictions. But DNA tests don't reveal how innocent people come to be prosecuted in the first place.The career of Kenneth Peasley does.

Although new evidence suggests that the co-defendants may have had nothing to do with the crime for which they were convicted, Peasley still believes that he prosecuted the right men. "I have never seen a case where I believed the prosecutors set out to prosecute someone whom they believed to be innocent," says Rob Warden, the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, whose staff members were involved in eleven of the eighteen recent exonerations on Illinois 's death row. "They just get wedded to a theory and then ignore the evidence that doesn't fit." According to Barry Scheck, who co-founded the Innocence Project, which has won exonerations for more than a hundred and fifty convicted defendants, "After a while, some veteran prosecutors think that they can just trust their gut. Once you get to the point where you believe your instincts must be right, you quickly get to the point where you just deep-six inconvenient evidence."

One of the men Peasley prosecuted in the 1992 case is still on Arizona 's death row. Unless a court intervenes, that man, Martin Soto-Fong, who was a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout at the time of the murders, will be executed, although no date has been set.The case already ranks as an extreme example of prosecu-torial misconduct, but if Martin Soto-Fong is killed for a crime he didn't commit, it will stand for something far worse.

Shortly after ten o'clock on the night ofJune 24, 1992, in Tucson, an anonymous caller dialed 911 and said, "Yeah, I just walked into the El Grande. It's on Thirty-sixth, and uh, there are two, uh, guys that work…They laying down on the floor, and one's laying in a pool of blood, and there's no one in the store."

The operator apparently recognized the reference to the El Grande Market; the battered, one-story painted-brick store was a landmark of sorts on the desolate streets of South Tucson -a desert ghetto of vacant lots, trailer parks, and auto-repair shops.When the police arrived at the scene, they found that the caller had understated things. There were three, not two, people on the floor, two dead and one dying from gunshot wounds. They were Fred Gee, forty-five years old, the store manager; Zewan Huang, seventy-five, Gee's uncle, who also worked there; and Raymond Arriola, thirty-one, who had started at the market as a clerk the previous month. Peasley soon arrived on the scene, as did Joseph Godoy, a detective with the Tucson Police Department.

This was familiar duty for Peasley. Shortly after he joined the Pima County prosecutor's office, in 1978, he agreed to be the first lawyer called to most murder scenes, and he held on to that demanding assignment, often working with Godoy, for almost two decades. For several months after the murders in the El Grande

Market, there were no viable suspects, and pressure built in the local press for a break in the case. One headline in the Arizona Daily Star read,"TRiPLE murder has police puzzled."

With a population of about half a million people, Tucson is one-third the size of Phoenix. The contrast between the two cities extends to politics and is exemplified by the difference between their two most famous sons, Morris Udall and Barry Goldwater. " Tucson is as far away from Phoenix as San Francisco is from Los Angeles," Bruce Babbitt, a former governor of the state, told me. " Phoenix was built on the pursuit of monetary gain, and Tucson was built around the university, which has given a kind of intellectual and idealistic strand to its politics." Tucson, however, never turned into a desert version of Berkeley or Cambridge. "There's always been a dark side to Tucson, too," Babbitt said. "The mob was a significant presence for years, with the Bonnano family living there. The drug trade, with the proximity to the Mexican border, has always been a problem."

Government, including law enforcement, dominates Tucson in the way that business, notably real-estate development, controls Phoenix. Dingy municipal buildings, not gleaming office towers, predominate in downtown Tucson. A couple of forlorn palm trees, and a cactus here and there, offer the only reminders of its desert setting. The county attorney's office long ago outgrew its quarters in the courthouse and now occupies nine floors in a dreary building a few blocks away. There, from a corner office on the tenth floor, Ken Peasley could watch storms roll in over the Santa Catalina Mountains.