Opinion ID: 181032
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Abdication of Brady

Text: The defendants next argue that the government shrugged off its obligations under Brady by simply handing over millions of pages of evidence and forcing the defense to find any exculpatory information contained therein. In essence, the defendants contend that the government was obliged to sift fastidiously through the evidence the vast majority of which came from Berkeley itselfin an attempt to locate anything favorable to the defense. This argument comes up empty. In United States v. Skilling, 554 F.3d 529 (5th Cir.2009), vacated in part on other grounds, ___ U.S. ___, 130 S.Ct. 2896, 177 L.Ed.2d 619 (2010), the Fifth Circuit confronted and rejected a nearly identical argument. There, disgraced Enron CEO Jeffrey K. Skilling advanced the following contentions: Skilling ... asserts that the government's use of an open file failed to satisfy its Brady obligation to disclose material evidence. Skilling contends that the government's open file, which consisted of several hundred million pages of documents, resulted in the effective concealment of a huge quantity of exculpatory evidence. As the government never directed Skilling to a single Brady document contained in the open file, Skilling argues that the government suppressed evidence in violation of Brady. Id. at 576. In dismissing Skilling's argument, the Fifth Circuit noted that, [a]s a general rule, the government is under no duty to direct a defendant to exculpatory evidence within a larger mass of disclosed evidence. Ibid. (citing United States v. Mulderig, 120 F.3d 534, 541 (5th Cir. 1997)). However, the Skilling court added a caveat: We do not hold that the use of a voluminous open file can never violate Brady. For instance, evidence that the government padded an open file with pointless or superfluous information to frustrate a defendant's review of the file might raise serious Brady issues. Creating a voluminous file that is unduly onerous to access might raise similar concerns. And it should go without saying that the government may not hide Brady material of which it is actually aware in a huge open file in the hope that the defendant will never find it. These scenarios would indicate that the government was acting in bad faith in performing its obligations under Brady. Id. at 577. Here, the government did not engage in any conduct indicating that it performed its Brady obligations in bad faith. First, there is no proof that the government larded its production with entirely irrelevant documents. [28] Furthermore, it cannot be said that the government made access to the documents unduly onerous. While access to the documents may have been somewhat hampered due to the format in which they were transferred, the district court noted that the defendants' motion practice demonstrate[d] they [were] capably navigating the discovery, which primarily all came from [the] [d]efendants in the first place. [29] Finally, there is no indication that the government deliberately concealed any exculpatory evidence in the information it turned over to the defense. [30] Consequently, the government has not abdicated its duties under Brady.