Opinion ID: 698663
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Barnes' Bagley Claim: Duty to Disclose.

Text: 48 If it were necessary to decide the question, I would find that Barnes has shown the first prong of his Bagley claim--that the prosecution violated its duty to disclose exculpatory evidence under United States v. Bagley and Brady v. Maryland. 4 The government's duty to disclose exculpatory evidence applies to evidence material either to guilt or to punishment, see Brady, 373 U.S. at 87, 83 S.Ct. at 1196, whether the information is in the hands of the prosecutor or the police, Boone v. Paderick, 541 F.2d 447, 450-51 (4th Cir.1976), cert. denied, 430 U.S. 959, 97 S.Ct. 1610, 51 L.Ed.2d 811 (1977). The duty applies even to information in the public record, Amadeo v. Zant, 486 U.S. 214, 224, 108 S.Ct. 1771, 1777, 100 L.Ed.2d 249 (1988); Anderson v. South Carolina, 709 F.2d 887, 888 (4th Cir.1983). An incomplete response by the government to a request for exculpatory evidence violates the duty to disclose: [A]n incomplete response to a specific request not only deprives the defense of certain evidence, but also has the effect of representing to the defense that the evidence does not exist. In reliance on a misleading representation, the defense might abandon lines of independent investigation, defenses, or trial strategies that it otherwise would have pursued. Bagley, 473 U.S. at 682, 105 S.Ct. at 3384. It is true that where the exculpatory information is not only available to the defendant but also lies in a source where a reasonable defendant would have looked, a defendant is not entitled to the benefit of the Brady doctrine. United States v. Wilson, 901 F.2d 378, 381 (4th Cir.1990). However, a reasonable defendant would not have looked into the matter any further once the prosecuting attorney represented that the Commonwealth did not possess exculpatory evidence. The Virginia Code of Professional Responsibility prohibits all attorneys from making false statements of fact and from concealing or failing to disclose information which an attorney is required to reveal. See Pt. 6, Sec. II, Rules of the Supreme Court of Virginia, Disciplinary Rule 7-102. A defense attorney may reasonably assume a prosecuting attorney is obeying the Code of Professional Responsibility. 49 Evidence of the location of the victim's gun here was supplied to the prosecution by a police officer in a police report. Barnes' trial counsel made a Brady request for [a]ny material or information which would tend to reduce the punishment of the defendant, including but not limited to ... any ... mitigating circumstances favorable to the defendant. The prosecution answered inaccurately that it had no such information. The prosecution also furnished defense counsel with the misleading stipulation quoted by the majority. Op. at 976. The majority's statement that [t]he record evidence plainly supports the state court's conclusion that Barnes could have discovered the location of the victim's gun through 'a reasonable and diligent investigation,'  op. at 976-77, is doubly inaccurate. Not only did the state court never make such a finding, 5 but no evidence was submitted to substantiate the Commonwealth's argument that Barnes' trial counsel reasonably would have interviewed police officers, attended the trial of the accomplice (Corey), read the transcript from his trial, etc. 6 Trial counsel had no reasonable duty to inquire about police officers' knowledge when he had been told simply that there was an unfired gun in the store, since, as he stated in unrebutted testimony, many storekeepers have guns behind the counter. Moreover, no evidence was presented to show that a reasonable defense counsel should be expected to sit in on the trial of an accomplice ten days before the trial of his own client--to the contrary one might think that the attorney must be preparing his client's evidence and his cross-examination of the prosecution's witnesses during the days immediately preceding trial. Because no evidence was produced showing that a transcript would have been immediately available from the accomplice's trial, the information was not shown to be reasonably available from that source either. Counsel for the accomplice never testified, so there was also no evidence as to the availability of information from that source. The Commonwealth never put its own prosecuting attorney on the stand, and so failed even to show that, if Barnes' trial counsel had asked the prosecuting attorney where the gun was, the prosecuting attorney would have answered truthfully after having misled trial counsel with the prior statements. Thus the first prong of Bagley, the violation of a duty to disclose, has been made out here. 50