Essential California

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Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Tuesday, Aug. 27, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. California has historically had some of the most restrictive laws in the nation regarding police records. Some of that began to change last year, when then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed two new laws that ushered in a new era of transparency, giving the public access to internal police investigations and video footage of shootings by police officers for the first time. Those laws went into effect Jan. 1. Now, a new California Supreme Court decision will further that tide of police transparency. On Monday, the state high court decided unanimously to overturn a 2017 appeals court ruling that prevented the L.A. County sheriff from giving prosecutors the names of problem deputies, even in pending criminal cases in which those deputies were listed as potential witnesses. Per the California Supreme Court’s ruling, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and other law enforcement agencies may now alert prosecutors that a deputy who is slated to testify in a criminal case has a history of misconduct. Prosecutors have a constitutional duty to share any evidence that could raise doubts about a defendant’s guilt (e.g., a deputy’s history of misconduct that could damage the deputy’s credibility in court) with the defense. Former L.A. County Sheriff Jim McDonnell wanted to share a list of 300 deputies who have a history of past misconduct with prosecutors, but the union representing rank-and-file deputies strongly opposed the decision and took the department to court on the matter. That same case made its way to the state Supreme Court after an appeals court ruled in favor of the union. These lists of officers are often referred to as “Brady lists” in reference to Brady vs. Maryland, a landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found that suppression of evidence favorable to the defense violated due process. (The prosecutorial duty to inform the defense of said evidence also stems from that case.) [Go deeper: Here’s a collection of our coverage on the Brady list investigation over several years] Police departments in at least a dozen counties around the state, including San Francisco, Sacramento and Ventura, already regularly send prosecutors the names of so-called Brady list officers, as courts reporter Maura Dolan explained in her story on Monday’s ruling. “In allowing police agencies to disclose the names of errant officers to prosecutors, the state high court tried to ‘harmonize’ state laws that protect police personnel records” with the 1963 Brady precedent, Dolan wrote. “Despite strong wording in the ruling reminding police and prosecutors of their duties to disclose, Monday’s decision did not require law enforcement agencies to keep lists of problem officers so they could be readily identified to prosecutors,” the story continued, explaining that trial judges will have broad discretion to decide what information in an officer’s personnel files actually gets disclosed, and some law enforcement agencies may still withhold relevant information.