Opinion ID: 744576
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Failure to impeach Del Frate

Text: 40 A second informant, John Del Frate, also testified at Thompson's trial. The district court concluded that Brower readily could have discovered and presented substantially more impeaching evidence against Del Frate. In particular, Brower failed to show that Del Frate's testimony that Thompson said he stabbed Fleischli in the torso and buried her in a shallow grave was both false as to what happened to Fleischli and, even more important, parroted almost verbatim inaccurate news reports. Brower also failed to discover that Del Frate had served as an informant since the age of fourteen, that two police agencies for whom Del Frate informed considered him unreliable, that Del Frate's family considered him to be a pathological liar, and that Del Frate had shared a cell with Leitch for several weeks before coming into contact with Thompson. The panel's conclusion that Brower could hardly have impeached Del Frate more than he did is patently wrong. 41 Brower's failure to investigate and impeach Del Frate, whose testimony he admitted was important to the prosecution's case, was unconstitutionally deficient. It also was prejudicial. As the prosecutor himself stated in his closing argument, Fink and Del Frate's testimony provided the dispositive evidence that Thompson had raped Fleischli and murdered her to cover up the rape. Had Brower impeached Del Frate, as well as Fink, the prosecution's rape case against Thompson would have been substantially weakened. Brower's cumulative errors in failing to investigate and impeach the jailhouse informants and to rebut the forensic evidence of rape cast grave doubt on the reliability of the rape conviction and the rape special circumstance finding, and thus of the death sentence itself. 42 For all of the reasons we have previously discussed, we grant Thompson's writ of habeas corpus with respect to the rape count, the rape special circumstance allegation, and the capital sentence.