Opinion ID: 1426052
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Applicability of Brady

Text: As we noted earlier, Steidl alleges that the defendants withh[eld] and suppress[ed] from Plaintiff's defense attorneys, and the judges, juries, post trial prosecutors, and the Governor and his staff, who were involved in Plaintiff's criminal proceedings, the highly exculpatory and exonerating evidence and obstruct[ed] investigations which would have led to discovery of further exculpatory evidence. For present purposes, we must take these allegations as true. Saucier, 533 U.S. at 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151. The proposition that it is unconstitutional for law enforcement officers to withhold or suppress exculpatory evidence finds its roots in Brady. We therefore look at that case first; it has been on the books since 1963 and easily qualifies as clearly established law. The Brady Court began by characterizing its holding as an extension of Mooney v. Holohan, 294 U.S. 103, 112 [55 S.Ct. 340, 79 L.Ed. 791 (1935)], which, it noted with approval, had already been expanded in Pyle v. Kansas, 317 U.S. 213, 215-16, 63 S.Ct. 177, 87 L.Ed. 214 (1942). Brady, 373 U.S. at 86, 83 S.Ct. 1194. Pyle held unconstitutional imprisonment result[ing] from perjured testimony, knowingly used by the State authorities to obtain [a] conviction, and from the deliberate suppression by those same authorities of evidence favorable to [the defendant]. Brady, 373 U.S. at 86, 83 S.Ct. 1194 (quoting Pyle, 317 U.S. at 215-16, 63 S.Ct. 177). The holding of Brady was not as narrowly confined as the ISP Officials would have it. The Court there held that the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused upon request violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution. 373 U.S. at 87, 83 S.Ct. 1194 (emphasis added). This holding mirrored the facts of the case. As the Court recounted those facts, one of the exculpatory statements was withheld by the prosecution and did not come to petitioner's notice until after he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced, and after his conviction had been affirmed.  Id. at 84, 83 S.Ct. 1194 (emphasis added). The Maryland courts had affirmed Brady's conviction, and on post-conviction review had refused to upset his conviction, though they had ordered further proceedings on the question of punishment. Id. at 84-85, 83 S.Ct. 1194. That was the posture of the case when the Supreme Court granted certiorari. On those facts, the Court concluded that the suppression of [potentially exculpatory evidence] was a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Brady, 373 U.S. at 86, 83 S.Ct. 1194. The fundamental principle at stake, it emphasized, is the avoidance of an unfair trial to the accused. Id. at 87, 83 S.Ct. 1194. The Court has not retreated from these fundamental principles in the cases that have followed Brady; to the contrary, it has repeatedly underscored the breadth of the Brady rule. Thus, for example, it held in United States v. Bagley, 473 U.S. 667, 676, 105 S.Ct. 3375, 87 L.Ed.2d 481 (1985), that Brady applies to impeachment evidence as well as to direct evidence of guilt. It has also made it clear that Brady 's principles apply to evidence both in the hands of the police and in the hands of the prosecutors. See Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419, 115 S.Ct. 1555, 131 L.Ed.2d 490 (1995). The defendants point to several decisions from other courts for support for their argument that Brady does not extend beyond the original trial. In one of those cases, however, the court squarely rejected the proposition for which the defendants are arguing. The only decision from a court of appeals on which they rely is Gibson v. Superintendent of N.J. Dep't of Law & Pub. Safety, 411 F.3d 427 (3d Cir.2005). In that case, plaintiff brought an action under § 1983 against officials of the New Jersey State Police claiming that his 1992 arrest on the New Jersey Turnpike was racially motivated. 411 F.3d at 431. In Gibson, however, the critical exculpatory materials were not uncovered until November 2000. (The court's opinion does not clearly identify when the police first had enough information to detect a pattern of racial profiling, as opposed to actions by particular officers.) Although the court commented that there is no constitutional duty to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence to a convicted criminal after the criminal proceedings have concluded and we decline to conclude that such a duty exists, id. at 444, that statement must be taken in context. Unlike Steidl's case, where the state officials suppressed the exculpatory evidence throughout every phase of the state proceeding, in Gibson the state disclosed the exculpatory evidence while his post-conviction proceeding was on appeal to the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division. The court also differentiated the Gibson defendants' failure to release general information that might have been (and in hindsight was) exculpatory for Gibson from a situation in which officials intentionally suppressed exculpatory evidence known at the time to be necessary for a convicted felon to obtain redress. Id. at 445. Under those circumstances, the Third Circuit held, Gibson was not entitled to pursue a § 1983 action against the state officials. The district court cases on which the ISP Officials rely also primarily address the question whether the state has the duty to disclose exculpatory evidence that is discovered after the trial is concluded. For that reason, we see no need to discuss them. Steidl's case is different. Here, just as in Brady itself, and in the later decision in Kyles v. Whitley , the evidence at issue was known to the police before Steidl was brought to trial. (We recognize that Kyles was decided after Steidl's trial took place, and so we mention it only for whatever light it throws on the scope of the original Brady and Bagley cases, not as an independent source of authority. Kyles was decided, however, well before the ISP Officials learned of and suppressed the exculpatory evidence here.) Brady dealt with evidence that did not come to petitioner's notice until after he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced, and after his conviction had been affirmed. 373 U.S. at 84, 83 S.Ct. 1194. We thus have no need here to decide whether disclosure of exculpatory evidence discovered post-trial is required under Brady; this case presents only the same question as the Court addressed in Brady, namely, whether exculpatory evidence discovered before or during trial must be disclosed during post-conviction proceedings. At almost the same time as Steidl's trial (and well before the involvement of the ISP Officials) the Supreme Court reiterated the fact that the duty to disclose [exculpatory material] is ongoing. Pennsylvania v. Ritchie, 480 U.S. 39, 60, 107 S.Ct. 989, 94 L.Ed.2d 40 (1987). In that case, which dealt with a sensitive youth service file containing materials about child abuse, the Court eventually concluded that the defendant was entitled to know whether information in the file might have changed the outcome of his trial, but that the proper procedure to use was an initial in camera inspection by the trial court. Id. at 61, 107 S.Ct. 989. The Tenth and Eleventh Circuits have viewed Ritchie as extending the duty of disclosure of evidence available for the trial to all stages of the judicial process. Smith v. Roberts, 115 F.3d 818, 820 (10th Cir.1997) (We also agree, and the State concedes, that the duty to disclose is ongoing and extends to all stages of the judicial process, citing Ritchie ); High v. Head, 209 F.3d 1257, 1265, n. 8 (11th Cir.2001) (noting that Ritchie establishes that the state's duty to disclose exculpatory materials is ongoing and citing with approval an opinion stating that the duty extends throughout the habeas corpus stage). By contrast, the Gibson court made no mention of Ritchie, which makes sense because that court was not discussing the duty to disclose exculpatory evidence that was available, but not disclosed, at trial. In our view, Brady, Ritchie, and the other cases in this line impose on the state an ongoing duty to disclose exculpatory information if, as Brady put it, that evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment and available for the trial. (The latter qualification is important, to the extent that Brady identifies a trial right, as the ISP Officials argue and as this court characterized it in Newsome v. McCabe, 256 F.3d 747, 752 (7th Cir.2001).) For evidence known to the state at the time of the trial, the duty to disclose extends throughout the legal proceedings that may affect either guilt or punishment, including post-conviction proceedings. Put differently, the taint on the trial that took place continues throughout the proceedings, and thus the duty to disclose and allow correction of that taint continues. We cannot accept the implicit premise of the state's position here, which is that Brady leaves state officials free to conceal evidence from reviewing courts or post-conviction courts with impunity, even if that concealment results in the wrongful conviction of an innocent person. It is worth recalling, in this connection, that the Brady rule was derived from the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Society wins, the Court wrote, not only when the guilty are convicted but when criminal trials are fair; our system of the administration of justice suffers when any accused is treated unfairly. 373 U.S. at 87, 83 S.Ct. 1194.