HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
THE UNTOUCHABLES
New Orleans Innocence Project,
a group that advocates for the
wrongfully convicted, says violations in low-level cases are much
less likely to come to light. “It’s
expensive to discover a Brady violation. They’re usually found after
conviction, with the help of investigators and attorneys poring
through police reports and prosecutors’ files.”
In fact, because Brady violations are suppressions of evidence, they’re only likely to come
to light once a defendant is given
full access to the state’s complete
case file. In Louisiana, that only
happens after conviction. Moreover, the only defendants who
have the right to a state-provided
attorney after conviction are those
who are facing the death penalty.
Indigent defendants sentenced
to life or less must find pro bono
help, or they’re on their own.
This means that the only convictions systematically vetted
for Brady violations in Louisiana are death penalty cases. And
here, the numbers are quite a bit
more alarming. Between 1973 and
2002, Orleans Parish prosecutors
sent 36 people to death row. Nine
of those convictions were later
overturned due to Brady viola-
tions. Four of those later resulted
in exonerations. In other words,
11 percent of the men Connick’s
office attempted to send to their
deaths — for which prosecutors
suppressed exculpatory evidence
in the process — were later found
to be factually innocent.
Over the years, even some of
the judges in Orleans Parish had
expressed concern about the culture in Connick’s office. In a 2011
brief to the U.S. Supreme Court,
the attorneys for another murder defendant named Juan Smith
cited press accounts going back to
the 1990s describing judges that
were “increasingly impatient with
what they say are clear violations
of discovery laws by prosecutors.”
One article reported that judges
had “voiced their dismay” over
an “active unwillingness to follow
the rule of law.” Some judges had
even ordered prosecutors to take
legal classes. The U.S. Supreme
Court overturned Smith’s conviction just last year, again because
of Brady violations.
The U.S. Supreme Court had already rebuked Connick’s office for
its culture of misconduct. In the
1995 case Kyles v. Whitley, Justice
David Souter’s majority opinion
scolded Orleans prosecutors for
“blatant and repeated violations”
of Brady, and described a culture
that had “descend[ed] to a gladi-