This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 16th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

The federal judge is claiming there is an epidemic of so-called Brady violations where prosecutors

fail to turn over evidence that favors defendants.

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice comments. Project on the U.S. Court of Appeals

Judge Alex Kaczynski on the U.S. Court of Appeals

of the Ninth Circuit claims in a dissent in a case

that we won't really get into that there is an epidemic of Brady violations.

And this deals with the relationship of the prosecutor to the court, what is a Brady violation?

Why does that matter?

The Brady violation refers to a landmark Supreme Court case that was handed down in 1963 where the Supreme Court said that prosecutors have a constitutional

obligation to divulge to the defense and to the court evidence that they have in their possession that tends to help the accused,

that tends to show either that the accused is innocent or that raises important questions and doubts about the evidence that the government is going to present.

So it includes evidence that may impeach the witnesses that the government is going to call for its trial.

So when those ethical and disclosure obligations are violated, lawyers and judges refer to

those violations as Brady violations.

Now the Supreme Court has dealt with this issue not that long ago, right?

Yes, these cases tend to come up on a regular basis where the trial is over, the person has been

convicted, and then he's trying to appeal his case, trying to get a new trial because of a Brady violation and the argument is is that if

we had known about this type of evidence if we had been able to present it to the

jury it's very likely the outcome of the case probably would have been different so they're

asking the appellate courts to reverse their conviction and order a new trial because of a Brady

violation.

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