Opinion ID: 1353458
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The State Withheld Crucial Exculpatory Evidence of Mr. Owens' Infidelities

Text: Prior to trial, Mrs. Owens requested that the state prosecutor provide the defense with all information in its possession that her husband had numerous girlfriends, extra-marital sexual affairs involving unusual sexual proclivities and/or perversions because these proclivities, perversions and affairs were flaunted and visited upon defendant with such regularity and in such ways as to contribute to [her] state of mind and mental condition.... (App.101.) [1] The prosecution had found sexually explicit love letters between Mr. Owens and one of his girlfriends, Gayla Scott. In the love letters, the two called each other fluff licker and lollipop, a clear reference to numerous oral sexual experiences between Ryan Owens and Gayla Scott. (App.412-413.) The detectives had written up their discovery of the love letters in a contemporaneous report describing them to the prosecution. The prosecution covered up the love letters while lying to the trial court and to opposing counsel in the following language: To the best of my knowledge we have shown them every single scintilla of evidence which we seized and which we have that came from the house. Anything that is in the possession of any law enforcement agency we have shown to counsel for the defense. The prosecutor went on to further the cover-up by saying to the trial court and Mrs. Owens that everything we have in the way of any kind of physical evidence, any piece of paper, any notebook  anything along those lines, letters and etc. that we have, we have made available to them. (App.111-115.) This set of falsehoods is typical of the conduct of the Memphis district attorney's office during this period. See Cone v. Bell, 492 F.3d 743, 759 (6th Cir.2007) (Merritt, J., dissenting), cert. granted, ___ U.S. ___, 128 S.Ct. 2961, 171 L.Ed.2d 883, 76 U.S.L.W. 3484 (2008). To the obvious prosecutorial falsehoods in this case, the majority opinion can only lamely answer that Mrs. Owens already knew that her husband, Ron Owens, was having affairs so that any documents and letters would not have been favorable or prejudicial because she herself could have testified to those facts herself. The majority argues that if a defendant has knowledge of any fact, or a reasonable suspicion of a fact, the defendant is not entitled to exculpatory evidence regarding that fact because she could testify regarding that fact herself. (My colleagues state their proposed rule as follows: Owens knew of the affair, and if she wanted to present evidence of the affair, she could have testified.... She loses because the proof she needed was available elsewhere. Opinion, p. 417.) The majority's proposed rule is nonsense. In Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963), the defendant, Brady, had knowledge that he did not kill the victim, but had no documentary evidence to support that knowledge or to support his view of the identity of the real culprit. Under the theory of the majority in the instant case, Brady was not entitled to any documentary evidence in the hands of the prosecution that would support any knowledge that Brady already had. Instead, according to the rule announced by my colleagues, Brady should have taken the stand and testified about his knowledge or put the real culprit on the stand and examined him. This argument is directly contrary to the Supreme Court's holding in Brady. The Court specifically held that Brady's knowledge that his co-defendant committed the crime obviously did not satisfy the prosecution's responsibility to provide specific information that it had regarding the co-defendant's guilt. Id. at 87, 83 S.Ct. 1194. The prosecution offered Owens life imprisonment (conditioned on the guilty plea of her confederate) because the killing under these mitigating circumstances  circumstances the jury never heard about at all  made her less culpable. The jury never heard the evidence in the hands of the prosecution that made her less culpable because the prosecution consciously and deliberately covered it up. And now my colleagues say fine, no problem, she should have taken the stand. Rather than tell the jury the truth about the matter, the prosecution told the jury that she killed her husband to get insurance money. (App.151-51.) On this issue, Owens' post-conviction counsel concludes in her reply brief: The prosecution's theory, however, would have held no sway had the prosecution complied with its constitutional obligations to disclose the letters between Gala Scott to Ronald Owens. Indeed, had the jury held in their hands the exculpatory pile of letters from Gala Scott, the jury would have seen the circumstances of the offense in a very different light. The jurors would have actually understood the cruelty which Gaile Owens said she endured, they would have been sickened by the whole ordeal, and they would have understood the real truth behind what happened to Ronald Owens. With the actual production of the letters, and with those letters being sent back to the jury room, reasonable jurors would have returned the very sentence which the prosecution said was appropriate for Gaile Owens: Life. (Appellee's Reply Br. 8-9.) This may or may not have been the result of the trial in Memphis, but it is certainly true that the blatant prosecutorial misconduct suppressing the love letters was highly material and prejudicial at the mitigation phase of the trial. To claim otherwise is to deny the obvious. Note that my colleagues cannot deny that the abused-wife defense was her best defense or that her lawyer offered no proof along this line  in part because the prosecutor covered it up but also because her lawyer did not do his job.