I remember watching an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit where one of the conflicts was that a primary piece of evidence against some people could not be used because it would compromise a federal terrorism case.
I can't help thinking that in a real-life situation, rather than accept that they might have to let a killer get off in order to protect the information, the police might decide that seeing as they know the guy's guilty and can't use their best evidence, they'll just falsify other evidence to get them. In fact, I can see the federal agents suggesting that they do this.
I think that an episode or a story where someone falsifies evidence for precisely this reason would make an interesting show.
For this to be done properly, we would need three things:
(1) A clearly guilty bad guy
(2) Sympathetic cops
(3) Unintedned consequences for their falsifying evidence (e.g. an innocent gets caught up and convicted as well)
Without (1) and (2), you have out of control cops, and the dilemma is too easy (the cops are evil, so what they do is evil). Without (3), the dilemma is also easily resolved, because we are shown that falsifying evidence doesn't have consequences. In otehr words, the morality of one side of the dilemma would be totally theoretical, divorced from reailty.
I think it would make an interesting story.
That is all.
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