Multitudinous Brady/Giglio/Napue Violations Basis for Habeas Relief for Two Capital Defendants

Douglas v. Workman, No. 01-6094 and Powell v. Workman, No. 06-6093, 3/26/09 - Great (conditional) habeas win in these companion Oklahoma death penalty cases. Smith and a young lady were walking along late one night after a party, at which Smith had drunk a lot and smoked pot. A car drove past them, turned around, and its occupants opened fire, killing the girl and wounding Smith. Smith gave several conflicting descriptions of the shooters and their car. He settled on Douglas and Powell as the killers. They were convicted after separate trials held almost two years apart and each was sentenced to death. Smith, as the only eyewitness, was the “linchpin” of the state’s case in each trial. In both trials, Miller, the prosecutor, extensively vouched for Smith’s credibility and emphasized that Smith was getting nothing in exchange for his truthful testimony.

To make a long story short, it eventually came out that Smith had told Miller early on that he could not identify the occupants of the car, but would identify Douglas and Powell in exchange for help in a pending drug case, which he got after Douglas’s trial (the first one) was over. Smith later leveraged the fact that Miller knew his testimony was false but presented it anyway to get Miller to intervene every time he got in trouble with the law again, which happened numerous times before Powell’s trial. Miller disclosed none of this and did everything he could to prevent its disclosure.

The blatant and intentional Napue/Brady/Giglio violations warranted habeas relief. The relief was conditional, however, because new trials could be had, free of those violations. So Douglas and Powell are not out of the woods yet.

There is an extensive discussion of the standards of review in § 2254 cases, and a very interesting one about second or successive petitions where, as in Douglas’s case, the newly-discovered evidence comes to light while the original habeas petition is pending, and petitioner wants to raise that in connection with the original petition.