Source: https://www.johntfloyd.com/smith-v-cain-a-look-at-prosecutors-duty-to-disclose/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 14:56:12+00:00

Document:
In 1963, the Supreme Court, in Brady v. Maryland, held that a prosecutor under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments has a duty to disclose favorable evidence to defendants upon request, if the evidence is material to guilt or punishment. Two decades later, in United States v. Bagley, the Supreme Court redefined Brady by holding that a prosecutor’s duty to disclose material favorable evidence exists regardless of whether the defendant makes a specific request. The Bagley court defined “material favorable evidence” as any evidence that probably would have changed the outcome of the trial. In 1999, the Court, in Strickler v. Greene, held that a Brady violation occurs: (1) evidence is favorable when it is exculpatory or impeaching; (2) the evidence was either willfully or inadvertently withheld by the prosecution; and (3) the withholding of the evidence was prejudicial to the defendant.
Clearly all this withheld evidence was either exculpatory or impeaching, and the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office had a duty to disclose it prior to Smith’s trial.
You would think that district attorney offices like Williamson County and Orleans Parish would get the Brady message from the Supreme Court that the duty to disclose is non-negotiable. Not so. Some prosecutors in these offices, just as they were under former Harris County district attorney Johnnie Holmes and Charles Rosenthal, are arrogant, unscrupulous, and consumed not only with a desire but a misperceived belief that they have a right to convict criminal defendants at any costs.
That’s why the ABA created the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, and in particular, Rule 3.8(d) which imposes a strict ethical obligation on prosecutors to disclose material favorable evidence to criminal defendants. Texas and Louisiana have adopted ethical rules patterned after Model Rule 3.8(d). In fact, Louisiana amended its 3.8 rule in 2006 to include not only evidence the prosecutor knows about but evidence he should know about. The ABA is essentially requesting in the Smith case that the Supreme Court “continue to recognize that a prosecutor’s pre-trial obligations to disclose exculpatory and mitigating evidence ‘may arise more broadly under a prosecutor’s ethical or statutory obligations,’ … than it required under the post-trial constitutional standard set out in Brady,” as the court discussed in 2009 in Cone v. Bell.
The Cone court distinguished the post-conviction setting where the reviewing court must make a constitutional determination of whether the withheld evidence was material whereas a prosecutor’s pre-trial ethical obligations to disclose are broader, and requires a “prudent prosecutor [to] err on the side of transparency, resolving doubtful questions in favor of disclosure.” The ABA pointed out in its brief that these pre-trial ethical obligations date as far back as 1908 when the association adopted its Canons of Professional Ethics which held that it would be “highly reprehensible” if a prosecutor failed to disclose evidence that might establish a defendant’s innocence.
It has become abundantly clear that the mandate of the constitutional case law governing Brady violations is not sufficient to curtail some prosecutors, like those in the district attorney offices like Orleans Parish and Williamson County, from withholding material favorable evidence. And since the Supreme Court has made it virtually impossible for wrongfully convicted defendants to sue and recover damages from prosecutors who knowingly send them to prison when there was is evidence of their actual innocence, prosecutors have no incentive to honor their pre-trial ethical obligations to disclose. They feel they can operate with impunity, facing no accountability except perhaps to suffer a reversal of conviction on appeal.
The Supreme Court in 1976, in United States v. Agurs, said a prosecutor is a “minister of justice” and not just an “advocate,” and “this responsibility carries with it specific obligations to see that the accused is accorded procedural justice and that guilt is decided upon the basis of sufficient evidence, including consideration of exculpatory evidence known to the prosecutor.” That places the prosecutor on the highest rung of the judicial ladder—a model perch of example, and when rogue prosecutors withhold evidence that will establish a defendant’s innocence, they transform this honored perch into a more advantageous position to knock off innocent people. How many inmates have grown old and died in prison—worse yet, how many have been executed—because rogue prosecutors withheld evidence that would have established their innocence? Some prosecutors in the Orleans Parish and Williamson County district attorney offices personify this kind of misconduct. These rogue prosecutors are “ministers of conviction,” regardless of the costs.
Permitting a prosecutor at the pre-trial stage to make ad hoc determinations of what evidence might be material—in other words, evidence that could potentially exculpate the defendant or impeach a government witness—and later having those materiality determinations judged solely by Brady post-conviction constitutional standards would seriously undermine the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct adopted by 49 of the nation’s fifty states. All a prosecutor would have to worry about is a reversal of defendant’s conviction in the post-conviction process. By keeping Rule 3.8(d) standards in place as a “broader” duty in the pre-trial setting, rogue prosecutors will at least know they could face harsh disciplinary sanctions from the state bar if they withhold any potentially favorable evidence. Remove the cover of materiality. All evidence a prosecutor plans to use at trial should be subject to disclosure. Materiality decisions in the post-conviction process are nothing more than judicial second-guessing; whether the withheld evidence would have resulted in a different outcome. Reinforcing Rule 3.8(b) standards provides a defendant and his lawyer, before conviction, with an opportunity let the jury determine whether a given piece of evidence is material to either guilt or punishment.
The importance of the 3.8(d) standards can be seen from the prosecutorial misconduct in the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office: Brady violations and overturned convictions occurred in six death penalty cases and seven in non-death penalty cases between 1976 and 2011. Years after one of those death penalty reversals, Kyles v. Whitley, former district attorney Harry Connick said he “saw no need, occasioned by Kyles, to make any changes” in his policy of keeping away as much information as possible from defendants. A similar attitude has existed in the Williamson County district attorney’s office for the past three decades. Perhaps Smith v. Cain will present yet another opportunity for the nation’s highest court to rein in rogue prosecutors. We can only hope it will.
(c) not initiate or encourage efforts to obtain from an unrepresented accused a waiver of important pre-trial, trial or post-trial rights.
(e) exercise reasonable care to prevent persons employed or controlled by the prosecutor in a criminal case from making an extrajudicial statement that the prosecutor would be prohibited from making under Rule 3.07.
(f) except for statements that are necessary to inform the public of the nature and extent of the prosecutor’s action and that serve a legitimate law enforcement purpose, refrain from making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused and exercise reasonable care to prevent investigators, law enforcement personnel, employees or other persons assisting or associated with the prosecutor in a criminal case from making an extrajudicial statement that the prosecutor would be prohibited from making under Rule 3.6 or this Rule.
(ii) undertake further investigation, or make reasonable efforts to cause an investigation, to determine whether the defendant was convicted of an offense that the defendant did not commit.
(h) When a prosecutor knows of clear and convincing evidence establishing that a defendant in the prosecutor’s jurisdiction was convicted of an offense that the defendant did not commit, the prosecutor shall seek to remedy the conviction.

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