SCOTUS will decide limits, if any, of prosecutorial immunity
The Supreme Court will hear oral argument Wednesday in Van de Kamp v. Goldstein, a case I blogged about previously. [Given that tomorrow is election day, I foresee that most of my time will be spent in front of the TV, watching election returns.]
In Van de Kamp, SCOTUS will decide whether the chief prosecutor for L.A. can be held civilly liable for a wrongful conviction, after members of his office failed to turn over ecxulpatory evidence to the defense.
From my previous post:
The lawsuit alleges that the prosecutor’s office failed to set up an intra-office system to disseminate information on the reliability of informants and because of that Goldstein was convicted based on false testimony from an unreliable informant.
Despite this suit’s civil context, the implications for those of us in the criminal world will be immense. If prosecutors will be held liable for failing to turn over exculpatory information that its office possesses (just as information in the possession of cops is imputed to the state), then perhaps they will start to err on the side of caution in what materials they turn over.
One of the biggest problems with Brady material these days is not that prosecutors willingly hold on to it, but that they sincerely don’t believe that some exculpatory material is exculpatory. Whatever the result of this case, hopefully it prompts them to take a closer look at their determinations.
I once represented a man on a charge of child sexual abuse. The rape kit, done some 36 hours after the alleged offense, showed no evidence of sexual abuse. The police and prosecutor had this information in May, charged the crime in August, withheld the report before the preliminary exam, and only turned it over after Christmas. Had it been available at the exam, the case would have been dismissed, said the judge who heard the case. My client sat in jail until March, when he was acquitted. I then complained to the bar about the withholding of exculpatory evidence. The prosecutor’s repsonse was that the rape exam kit, showing no sexual abuse had occured, was NOT exculpatory, a position the bar agreed with. If the bar won’t treat such matters as exculpatory, we need to be able to sue for such misconduct.