I'm preparing a paper and talk on protecting the record regarding discovery and Brady in capital cases for the upcoming AGLCL conference.
I'm curious in what the different procedures are for handling discovery in capital cases in the different jurisdictions. Do you do it the same as regular cases or modify it? What sort of documentation do you use? How and why have you gotten burned in spite of your best efforts?
Also, I'm interested in whether anyone has any particularly interesting horror stories on discovery gone awry in capital cases.
Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated.
Thanks
Lisa

In Grimes county, we do capital discovery differently than other cases. We Bates stamp every document in this file other than attorney work product/notes. We copy the entire file for defense counsel. We copy every photo, audio/video statement for defense counsel. We then do a written discovery compliance which details the statements provided & the Bates numbered pages being provided to defense counsel. We require defense counsel to personally sign for these documents upon receipt.

This makes it easy to defend against Brady claims by defense counsel b/c I can tell them such & such document is page number 5, provided in discovery compliance such & such on a particular date.

We also file our normal written discovery compliance with witness list, witness history, extraneous notice, & any potential Brady material. The written discovery compliances are filed with the court.

In a normal case we do not copy our entire file nor do we copy all witness statements or photos. In a capital case we copy even the offense reports, in a normal case we will not provide a copy to defense counsel, we only allow them to take notes from the offense report.

Formerly we would copy the discovery for the defnese, I only stamp for people I either don't know or don't trust. This time around, I have both hard-copied and scanned onto disk. The disks I have given to the defense and filed with the clerk. I have given the defense hard copies as well. The clerk was very happy with three CDs rather than 2-3 file boxs of material.

In future, the defense will have the ability to copy certain things from our secure webnet using a password. This is probably the last one I will do hard copies on. For cassette recordings, I am still making copies. In future I expect most of our police agencies will use a digital format to record statements.