The New York Times has the story.
Basically, a lawyer represented one of two men in the late 1990's who was accused of killing another man during a robbery. A critical issue in the case was who pulled the trigger, as only that person could be sentenced to death.
The lawyer and his client met with the prosecutor, and the client started to give a description of the killer that was inconsistent with the other defendant's guilt. The prosecutor turned off the tape recorder, coached the defendant as to what his statement needed to be, turned the tape back on, and then got the statement that he needed to get a death sentence against the other defendant, a man named Daryl Atkins (who was a party to the well-known Supreme Court case establishing the unconstitutionality of executing the mentally retarded).
The lawyer who witnessed this prosecutorial misconduct never notified the lawyers for Atkins, presumably because his own client got life in prison instead of a death sentence. Nevertheless, the lawyer's conscience troubled him, and after repeatedly asking the bar authorities in Virginia, he recently received permission to reveal the information to the court.
For readers of this blog, the interesting question is whether the ethics rules in Virginia permit this disclosure, because according to the article, there is some disagreement about it. In particular, the report required disclosure of confidential information that might adversely affect the lawyer's previous work for his client (i.e., getting him life instead of death). Moreover, the lawyer had not put on any false testimony or committed a fraud on the court. Rather, it was the prosecutor who committed the misconduct, so it's not entirely clear that the lawyer even had discretion to report this information.
On a popular legal ethics listserv, someone suggested that, if this case had been in Massachusetts, the answer would have been clear. Massachusetts has an unusual rule, which permits lawyers to disclose confidential information "to prevent the wrongful execution or incarceration of another." (As an aside, there was a great episode of the Practice a few years ago, which turns on this provision. There's even an explicit discussion in the episode of the Massachusetts version of Rule 1.6(b) and how it differs from all other states in this small respect. You don't see chapter and verse of ethics rules cited too often in a prime time drama, so it's a real classic for legal ethics nerds. If anyone wants a pointer to the episode, let me know.)
In any event, there is no case law that I know of that interprets the Massachusetts Rule, but I could imagine an argument that a "wrongful" execution or incarceration only occurs when the wrong person was convicted, not "merely" when a person's rights were violated during the proceeding. Put another way, I had always thought of this exception as one meant to address the hypos we profs use in class: a lawyer learns that someone committed a crime for which a third person is currently incarcerated or about to be executed. That scenario is slightly different than the present case, where Atkins may in fact still be guilty, but his conviction was severely tainted by prosecutorial misconduct. Personally, I think the Massachusetts rule should still cover the Atkins scenario, but I think there is at least an argument that the Rule wouldn't stretch that far.
As for Virginia, I was curious about Rule 3.3(d), which says that "A lawyer who receives information clearly establishing that a person other than a client has perpetrated a fraud upon a tribunal shall promptly reveal the fraud to the tribunal." In this case, it seems to me that the lawyer in question received information that another person (i.e., the prosecutor) was perpetrating a fraud on the tribunal during the prosecution of Mr. Atkins. I could be misunderstanding some of the basic facts here, but that provision does seem to apply. Perhaps there is an exception to this obligation when it would lead to the revelation of one's own client's confidential information, but I didn't see anything in the Virginia rules to this effect after a rather cursory look. Does anyone know why 3.3(d) wouldn't have applied here right from the start of this case?