Torres: Former assistant state attorney shows integrity by quitting

The great Vince Lombardi once famously said "Winners never quit and quitters never win."

And he was right, for the most part. But the inspirational quote, I have recently discovered, likely needs an asterisk to acknowledge those rare occasions when the quitter does indeed win. This is one of those occasions.

Earlier this year, Judge Steven Henderson declared a mistrial in a felony battery trial due to prosecutorial misconduct by prosecutor Byron Aven.

Assistant State Attorney Chris Cusmano was assisting Aven in the case, serving as second-chair, when it was revealed that Aven knowingly presented false information that contradicted a surveillance video he refused to show in court. The judge ordered the video played and then declared mistrial, setting the defendant free.

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Cusmano waited for Aven to be dismissed from his job but when that didn't happen, Cusmano said he saw no other choice but to resign himself. He said he couldn't work in the same office as Aven anymore.

"When the court first played the surveillance video and revealed what occurred, my heart sank," Cusmano wrote in a September resignation letter to Archer several weeks before his October departure. "It remained the only time in my tenure at the office that I felt no sense of pride in what I was a part of."

The state argued against the mistrial in court but ultimately did not appeal the decision that Aven had deliberately mislead the jury and suborned false testimony.

Archer promised an investigation. Cusmano believed Aven would eventually be relieved of his duties after being given an appropriate amount of time to get his affairs in order. But it never happened.

The State Attorney's Office declined to comment for this story.

"I fully expected (Aven) to resign and be given time to get his affairs in order, but when that did not happen, I trusted the office would terminate his position after the internal investigation," Cusmano told me in an email last month after I learned of hs October departure from the State Attorney's Office.

Instead, Aven's 'punishment' was to be removed from all trial work and instead be reassigned to do intake work, deciding which cases would be prosecuted. For Cusmano that simply was not enough.

"I must respectfully disagree that it sufficiently addresses the prosecutorial misconduct that occurred and protect the public in the office going forward," Cusmano wrote to Archer. "The decision whether or not to file charges may be the most important and consequential decision of prosecutor ever makes and it is a decision made with nearly unfettered discretion and generally without court supervision."

That's a great point. If Aven was so bold as to do what he did in front of a judge and jury, what might he do without oversight? We all know what happened in the 1980s when the prosecutor's office used a fraudulent dog handler to win several wrongful convictions that were later overturned.

Cusmano, who is now serving the public good as an attorney with the Guardian ad Litem office had nothing but praise for his other former coworkers. He said senior staff members with the State Attorney's Office never asked him to minimize what occurred or not fully disclose his thoughts with the court.

That, Cusmano stated in his resignation letter, is what makes Archer's decision to retain Aven difficult to understand.

"This type of serious misconduct is wholly antithetical to the values of the office and should be treated like a cancer – removed entirely lest it spread," he wrote.

Let's hope what spreads is Cusmano's dedication to ethics and the truth and the belief that in some cases quitters really do win.

Contact Torres at  jtorres@floridatoday.com. You can follow him on Twitter @johnalbertorres or on Facebook at facebook.com/FTjohntorres.

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