HADLEY: Did you make any subsequent effort to ascertain the identity of those individuals driving that Mustang?

FRYE: No; other than verbally to people who ride that area out there to be on the lookout for that vehicle.

And there the matter ended.

Frye wasn't required to believe that suspected murderers had driven a dark Mustang on Christmas Eve.  He wasn't required to subscribe to Zeigler's version of the crime; he just had to make a good-faith effort to investigate the possibilities, and be prepared to follow the answers where they might lead.

But he did not.  The record belies any claim of a full and fair investigation.  The state's investigators seem to have assiduously avoided any area of inquiry that might have tended to exculpate the defendant.

CUSTODIAN OF JUSTICE

Few public officials hold positions of such power as a chief prosecuting attorney, through whose office the state administers the law and attempts to punish the offenses of its citizens, sometimes by death.  A defense lawyer represents a single client; a chief prosecutor is the custodian of justice in his jurisdiction.

It is an enormous trust, requiring probity and even-handedness. Vincent Bugliosi, who successfully prosecuted the Mansion Family murder convictions, has written of the prosecutor's duty to be fair.  The prosecutor, he says, "represents "the people," and in more than a theoretical sense, one of those people is the defendant.  So while he can justifiably seek a conviction in cases he believes in, he has the concomitant duty to help insure that the person he is prosecuting receives a fair trial.... [I]t is as much a prosecutor's duty to refrain from using improper methods to secure a wrongful conviction as if is to use every legitimate measure to bring about a just one."5 That is the ideal.

The reality of Florida v. Zeigler was far different.  A March 12, 1976, letter over Eagan's signature reflects the prosecution's methods. Eagan addressed a sergeant in the OCSO's Crimes Against Person section:

I was disturbed to learn at our conference yesterday that T. Zeigler had been interviewed by sheriff's deputies reference loan sharking or other matters.

I specifically recommended to Deputy Jim Harris, when he asked me about it, that no interview be had until Zeigler was ready

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5  And the Sea Will Tell, Vincent Bugliosi with Bruce B. Henderson, 1991.