A recent decision in the 4th Circuit, Juniper v. Zook, sheds some light on how Brady violations can occur. In that case, a capital murder prosecution, prosecutors failed to disclose to the defense evidence from an eyewitness that potentially identified another suspect other than the defendant. The reason?

From the Baton Rouge Advocate:  A state district court judge has overturned Wilbert Jones’ 1974 conviction in the abduction and rape of a Baton Rouge nurse, saying “highly favorable” evidence was withheld from the defense.

Jones, now 64, was found guilty in the Oct. 2, 1971, rape of a young Baton Rouge General Medical Center nurse who was abducted from the hospital parking lot. As the appellate judge noted, the case against Jones was “weak, at best.” The state’s entire case rested entirely on the nurse’s testimony, and questionable identification of Jones that came more than three months after her rape. The victim “admittedly was not certain about her identification of Jones, and she even expressed doubts to officers regarding the identification,” Anderson said.

At the same time, in 1971, police and prosecutors were aware of another young woman kidnapped a few days later, Oct. 29, 1971, from the parking lot of another nearby medical facility, Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical, and also raped. The court said that the “strong similarities” between the two rapes are “almost too numerous to list.” He also stated that the nurse’s physical description of her attacker is “an almost identical match” to Arnold Ray O’Conner, who was convicted of armed robbery in a September 1973 home-invasion rape near Baton Rouge General. O’Conner’s fingerprints were found on the car of the woman kidnapped from the Our Lady of the Lake parking lot and raped, but Anderson said he was arrested but never charged in that incident. The prosecution was clearly obligated to turn over information about the second rape to Jones’ trial attorneys but failed to do so, and the court found that “there is a reasonable probability that, had the information been disclosed to competent counsel, the result of the proceeding would have been different.”

Is 46 years in prison on this record enough for the prosecution? Apparently not. The East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney’s Office said they will ask the Louisiana Supreme Court to review the ruling in Jones’ case.

From the Washington Post:

“Three U.S. servicemen who have been in prison for 25 years for a racially-motivated murder are entitled to a new trial because prosecutors improperly withheld evidence that would have helped the men’s defense, Georgia’s highest court ruled Thursday.

Stanley Jackson, a black man, was fatally shot around 10 p.m. on Jan. 31, 1992, while standing on a corner in a high-crime part of Savannah. Three white servicemen stationed at nearby Fort Stewart — Mark Jason Jones, Kenneth Eric Gardiner and Dominic Brian Lucci — were arrested less than an hour later and charged with murder.

State prosecutors failed to disclose a police report that described a similar racially-motivated incident later that night after they were in custody, Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice P. Harris Hines wrote in a unanimous opinion…

After police records were released in response to a 2010 open records request, the three men challenged their conviction on constitutional grounds. The records showed that prosecutors had failed to give the defense a police report describing an incident about three hours after the men were arrested in which a witness said white men with military style haircuts and semi-automatic weapons drove through a public housing project threatening “to shoot blacks who hung out on street corners.”

In addition to the undisclosed similar incident, the police records also revealed that an eyewitness who had identified two of the three men at trial had told officers before trial that he could not identify the shooters, and that he had been pressured into testifying at trial that he could identify them.

State attorney general’s office spokeswoman Katelyn McCreary said in an email that the office is reviewing the opinion and had no further comment.