Kern County District Attorney Ed Jagels, in office since 1982, takes pride in presiding over one of the toughest towns on crime in America — with more per capita sentences to prison and under the state’s Three Strikes and You’re Out law than any other jurisdiction in the state. But he also has presided over more than 100 wrongful prosecutions (of this total, 60 were wrongful convictions overturned on appeal and with only a handful of them retried, with the balance dismissed or dropped). Despite sending at least 60 people to prison unjustly, many for lengthy terms in cases riddled with mistakes and misconduct, neither Jagels nor his office have ever been held accountable, never admitted a mistake, and never apologized for the errors as, one by one, most of these people have been released by the appeals courts, some of them serving as many as 16 years in prison before winning their freedom. The worst case of prosecutorial misconduct in California history, People vs. Pitts, occurred on Jagels' watch, in which seven men and women served more than six years in prison; the appeals court that reversed the convictions spent more than a hundred pages detailing examples of the prosecutorial misconduct in the case.

Click here for chart showing wrongful convictions and prosecutions in Kern County.