On the one hand, these guys were royally framed and should have recovered andthe prosecutors should have been hammered.  Legally speaking, of course.  On the other, and thankfully, the real cases of misconduct such as these are few and ar between.  In the past, I've defended enough civil cases brought against prosecutors to have recognized that few, if any, of them have any merit.  One plaintiff was honest enough to admit that he was prosecuting the case as much for his own entertainment as anything else.

But the nature of an absolute immunity is also anathema to a system of law.  Absolute immunity, effectively, places the beneficiary of that immunity above the law.  In the few situations where an absolute immunity is granted by law, the beneficiaries of it (judges and prosecutors, mostly) have to be scrupulous to not place themselves in a position to abuse it or to be seen as abusing it.

I think often of the two Pennsylvania judges who ran a scheme where they sent juveniles to jail for acts that weren't crimes, and took part in the profits of the private jail they sent the kids to.  That is a case where, in addition to prison time, those judges should have to pay.  In a just world, that is.  (Please note, though, that those judges tried to plead guilty to the federal charges pending against them, but the trial judge rejected the pleas and plea deals, and they are waiting trial.  They had not accepted responsibility for their actions, was the trial judge's reason.) The problem, though, is that the nature of our legal system is that in every case, someone walks away dissatisfied.  Often, everyone walks away dissatisfied.  We lawyers know that, but litigants might not be able to get their heads around it.  Those Pa. judges have been the beneficiaries of the absolute immunity even though any sense of justice would howl at it.  But, I can't see any way to protect an independent judiciary willing to make calls against popular sentiment or powerful people other than to give them an absolute immunity.