"Today the Court saw more evidence of that pattern as it considered a case in which Connick's office failed to disclose a key witness's conflicting statements to Juan Smith, the defendant in a multiple murder trial. Justice Antonin Scalia, who voted with the majority in Connick v. Thompson, lost patience with Assistant District Attorney Donna Andrieu, who persisted in arguing that the prosecution was not obligated to share the statements under Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 decision that established a defendant's due process right to see such evidence. "Surely it should have been turned over," Scalia said. "Why don't you give that up?""
JACOB SULLUM: REASON; (Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and Reason.com and a nationally syndicated columnist.)
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This blog is particularly interested in the Juan Smith case because of the deplorable record of the Orlean's Parish District Attorney's office in disclosing exculpatory evidence to the accused - including important forensic evidence. In the John Thompson case, after Thompson had been put on death row a private investigator hired by his lawyer found a blood test in the police lab that showed the man wanted for a related carjacking had type B blood, while Thompson's was type O. Thompson had been charged with and convicted of an attempted carjacking near the Superdome as a prelude to charging him with the unsolved murder of a hotel executive. The newly revealed blood test spared Thompson's life, and a judge ordered a new trial on the murder charge that had sent him to death row. His new defense lawyers found other evidence that had been hidden, including eyewitnesses reports. Bystanders reported seeing a man who was 6 feet tall with close-cropped hair running away holding a gun. Thompson was 5 feet 8 and had a bushy Afro. With the new eyewitness reports and other evidence that pointed to another man as the killer, Thompson was quickly acquitted of all the charges in a second trial. (Information from the L.A. Times); I find it hard to imagine worse prosecutorial misconduct than withholding key exculpatory forensic evidence from a person facing the death penalty if convicted (as in the Thompson case) - or holding back from the defence information that a crucial eyewitness had made conflicting statements (as in the Juan Smith case); For shame.
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"Last March the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an $14 million award to John Thompson, a Louisiana man who spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, because prosecutors in the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office deliberately withheld crucial exculpatory blood evidence," the Reason post by Jacob Sullum published on Nov. 8, 2011, under the heading, "How many Brady violations does it take to make a pattern?," begins.
"Since the prosecutors themselves enjoyed "absolute immunity" for their egregious misconduct, Thompson argued that their office should be held liable for failing to properly train them in their constitutional obligations," the post continues.
"A federal jury agreed, and so did the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. But the Supreme Court reversed that ruling, saying Thompson had not demonstrated a pattern of disregard for constitutional rights under District Attorney Harry Connick that was tantamount to official policy. Today the Court saw more evidence of that pattern as it considered a case in which Connick's office failed to disclose a key witness's conflicting statements to Juan Smith, the defendant in a multiple murder trial. Justice Antonin Scalia, who voted with the majority in Connick v. Thompson, lost patience with Assistant District Attorney Donna Andrieu, who persisted in arguing that the prosecution was not obligated to share the statements under Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 decision that established a defendant's due process right to see such evidence. "Surely it should have been turned over," Scalia said. "Why don't you give that up?"
As New York Times reporters Campbell Robertson and Adam Liptak noted last week, the Brady violations in both cases seem to reflect Connick's "win-at-all-cost approach":
The Orleans Public Defenders office, in a brief supporting Mr. Smith [who is seeking a new trial], said that 28 convictions obtained by the district attorney's office were later ruled to have been tainted by violations of this kind.
The district attorney's office disagrees, saying the correct number is 13. In its own Supreme Court brief, it called such lapses lamentable....
Four defendants who were sentenced to death in Orleans Parish were later exonerated in cases involving violations of the Brady decision; another, who was facing a death sentence, was granted a new trial last year.
More broadly, according to a survey of both capital and non-capital cases by the Innocence Network, 10 prisoners have been exonerated since 1990 in Orleans Parish in such cases.
Two of the capital cases reached the Supreme Court. In the first, in 1995, the justices admonished District Attorney Harry F. Connick, who ran the office from 1974 to 2003, and told him to be more careful. In a concurrence, Justice John Paul Stevens called the office's violations "blatant and repeated."
Still, Mr. Connick testified in 2007 that he had seen no need to change the office's policies after the 1995 warning....
In a 2004 affidavit in another Brady-related wrongful conviction case, Bill Campbell, who had worked in the prosecutor’s office during Mr. Connick’s tenure, put it simply: "The policy was 'When in doubt, don't give it up.'"
Even Mr. Connick's successor, Eddie Jordan, came close to acknowledging as much in a 2003 interview with The Times-Picayune. "The previous administration," he said, "had a policy of keeping away as much information as possible from the defense attorney."
Dissenting last March in Connick v. Thompson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and three other justices likewise concluded:
The conceded, long-concealed prosecutorial transgressions were neither isolated nor atypical.
From the top down, the evidence showed, members of the District Attorney's Office, including the District Attorney himself, misperceived Brady's compass and therefore inadequately attended to their disclosure obligations. Throughout the pretrial and trial proceedings against Thompson, the team of four engaged in prosecuting him for armed robbery and murder hid from the defense and the court exculpatory information Thompson requested and had a constitutional right to receive. The prosecutors did so despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight. Based on the prosecutors' conduct relating to Thompson's trials, a fact trier could reasonably conclude that inattention to Brady was standard operating procedure at the District Attorney's Office.
What happened here...was no momentary oversight, no single incident of a lone officer's misconduct. Instead, the evidence demonstrated that misperception and disregard of Brady's disclosure requirements were pervasive in Orleans Parish. That evidence...established persistent, deliberately indifferent conduct for which the District Attorney's Office bears responsibility.
It is hard to see how the district attorney's office can deny this pattern of Brady negligence when its representatives, including Andrieu and Connick himself, have continued to profess uncertainty about the decision's requirements long after the constitutional violations were revealed."
http://reason.com/blog/2011/11/08/how-many-brady-violations-does-it-take-t
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;
