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"Exculpatory" Is Just Another Word For "Liberal, Criminal-Coddling Nonsense"

Jul 19, 2011
By .
Effluvia

The furor of the totmomocalypse is dying down as almost everybody looks for the next imperiled cute white child or sexually threatening suspect. And yet . . . there are other shoes to drop. There always are.

At trial, the government offered evidence that somebody used the Anthony computer to search for "chloroform" 84 times. That was perhaps the prosecution's strongest piece of evidence (if not its only piece of evidence) that Casey Anthony committed a premeditated act of murder.

As it turns out, the figure was bogus, based on the software error. The real number was one. The prosecution knew it was bogus, and concealed it:

The Orange County Sheriff’s Office had used the software to validate its finding that Ms. Anthony had searched for information about chloroform 84 times, a conclusion that Mr. Bradley says turned out to be wrong. Mr. Bradley said he immediately alerted a prosecutor, Linda Drane Burdick, and Sgt. Kevin Stenger of the Sheriff’s Office in late June through e-mail and by telephone to tell them of his new findings. Mr. Bradley said he conducted a second analysis after discovering discrepancies that were never brought to his attention by prosecutors or the police.

Mr. Bradley’s findings were not presented to the jury and the record was never corrected, he said. Prosecutors are required to reveal all information that is exculpatory to the defense.

“I gave the police everything they needed to present a new report,” Mr. Bradley said. “I did the work myself and copied out the entire database in a spreadsheet to make sure there was no issue of accessibility to the data.”

Mr. Bradley, chief executive of Siquest, a Canadian company, said he even volunteered to fly to Orlando at his own expense to show them the findings.

If Mr. Bradley is telling the truth — if he did discover that the "84 searches" claim was false, and notified the prosecution that the actual number was one — then the prosecution committed grave misconduct. First, it committed misconduct by not disclosing that exculpatory fact to the defense. Second, it committed misconduct by not correcting the mistaken testimony on its own initiative. A prosecutor's failure to correct known false testimony is a due process violation.

What do you suppose that Nancy Grace, who has a judicially-recognized habit of suppressing exculpatory evidence, will say to that? I'm not sure — but it will involve a snarl, I bet.

Last 5 posts by Ken

11 Comments
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11 Comments

  1. Professor Coldheart  •  Jul 19, 2011 @12:38 pm

    And yet no punishment will be handed down. Ain't prosecutorial immunity a beautiful thing?

  2. Gideon  •  Jul 19, 2011 @12:51 pm

    IT DOESN'T MATTER BECAUSE SHE'S GUILTY! (bleated in the voice of the "she's not a Christiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaan" woman from Wife Swap all those years ago, aka Nancy Grace.)

  3. Scott Jacobs  •  Jul 19, 2011 @6:46 pm

    @Gideon

    I remember that one. Best part of that episode was when she yelled about 'not wanting this devil money', and at the end they had a still shot from that scene with the caption "two weeks later, she cashed the check".

  4. Dan Weber  •  Jul 19, 2011 @6:52 pm

    So what happens in the alternate universe where Casey Anthony was convicted and then we learn this?

  5. deadcenter  •  Jul 19, 2011 @7:46 pm

    Immunity for prosecutors is from civil litigation is one thing; where are the disciplinary boards and ethics committees handing out suspensions when these kinds of abuses come to light?

  6. Linus  •  Jul 19, 2011 @10:46 pm

    With the concept of "harmless error" watching their back, and the toothless spectre of bar discipline hovering over them, well, toothlessly, why wouldn't power- and fame-hungry prosecutors "forget" to disclose exculpatory evidence? Lord Acton is on line 2.

  7. Pete  •  Jul 20, 2011 @4:39 am

    You know what I don't understand, being an unwashed mass? Are the BAR Associations granted immunity for failing to do their clear duty? Aren't the various state BARs supposed to censure and even 'defrock' attorneys who commit gross violations of ethics and/or flagrant misconduct? Why not sue THEM for dropping the ball?

  8. Justin  •  Jul 20, 2011 @12:59 pm

    Casey Anthony had a reason to look up chloroform. A person that she was dating at the time, who was the state's witness, admitted on cross-examination that he had a parody ad on his Myspace page that said "Win Her Heart With Chloroform".
    It makes sense that she would look up chloroform if she didn't know what it was since Google is the way we all answer (embarrassing) questions these days.
    (If I could be prosecuted for my searches I would probably be on death row. This is a joke).
    Additionally the prosecutor's IT experts got the number of Myspace views and the chloroform searches reversed. When the defense walked him through his corrected spreadsheet day by previous day the Myspace view would drop by one, each date they went backward. This would correspond with the DHCP lease, which typically renews every day unless you set it different.
    The image is located at:
    http://lulzimg.com/i24/22bf25.jpg

  9. SPQR  •  Jul 20, 2011 @6:09 pm

    Well, Pete, around here the attorney regulation dept ( part of the Supreme Court office rather than the Bar Assn ) focuses on counting accounting errors in trust accounting.

    Because it's easier to just sit on your ass and wait for a NSF notice to show up from a bank than doing real attorney regulation.

  10. Xmas  •  Jul 21, 2011 @4:41 am

    JWZ is all over the tech issue…Mozilla brought in a crappy internal database in 2004 that had all sorts of problems…

  11. Mike De Lucia  •  Jul 22, 2011 @9:42 am

    Up until a couple months ago, I had no opinion about Nancy Grace. However after weeks of constantly seeing her pudgy mug on the TV screen, I feel my loathing of her rising to Hillary-esque proportions. And now there's some new white-person killing going on, so she's back for more. Someone please make it stop!