The Brady Database

The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brady v. Maryland turns sixty

this year. The Brady doctrine, which requires the government to disclose

favorable and material evidence to the defendant, is one of the most

frequently litigated criminal procedure issues. Yet, despite decades of Brady

cases in federal and state courts, we still know relatively little about how

Brady claims are litigated, adjudicated, and what such claims can tell us

about the criminal justice system writ large. Scholars are in the dark about

how often Brady violations occur, whether it is primarily the fault of

prosecutors or the police, whether violations are intentional or accidental,

and a host of related questions.

This Article fills a gap in the data and literature by analyzing five years

of Brady claims—over 800 cases—raised in state and federal courts. We

coded each case for more than forty variables to answer big-picture

questions like how often Brady claims are successful and which courts are

most likely to grant relief. We also studied more intricate questions such as

the types of crimes and evidence at issue, whether judges deemed violations

intentional or accidental, and whether judges chastised or disciplined

prosecutors for failing to disclose evidence.

Our study revealed some important and surprising findings. Despite

suggestions in some quarters that prosecutorial misconduct is not a major

problem, courts found Brady violations in 10% of the cases in our study.

Prosecutors, not police, were responsible for most violations and they were

almost never referred to the Bar for discipline. While federal prosecutors are

supposed to be elite highly trained lawyers, they were responsible for a

disproportionate share of Brady violations. And while the federal courts are

lauded as the protector of civil liberties, it was state courts that granted relief

more frequently, often on direct review rather than in habeas corpus

proceedings as scholars would have expected.

These findings and many others—such as petitioners having to wait on

average ten years for relief for Brady violations—demonstrate that we

continue to have egregious prosecutorial misconduct problems in the United

States and that further study is needed. To that end, this project not only

reports significant data, but also is the first step in the creation of a

searchable database that we are creating to empower other researchers