Transparency & Accountability

Brady-Giglio Disclosures

The Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office is part of a growing number of prosecutor offices around the nation advancing criminal justice reform and accountability. Prosecutors have a special responsibility to seek justice. In addition to sharing information with defendants that tends to show their innocence, prosecutors have a duty to share information that impacts a witness’s credibility. These disclosures are known as Brady-Giglio disclosures named after the United States Supreme Court Cases Brady v Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), and United States v. Giglio, 405 U.S. 150 (1972) which established this responsibility.

Our office has begun to take a formal, consistent, and streamlined approach to these inquiries of law enforcement officers and their agencies in order to identify credibility issues such as dishonesty, bias, criminal acts, or misconduct. We have begun to utilize the first phase of an automated system to facilitate these inquiries. Additional phases of the automated system are under development and will be rolled out incrementally.

As part of the transition to this formalized system, we started our new inquiries with officers who are witnesses in active cases with upcoming pretrial interviews or trials. The table below represents disclosures we have made in this initial phase. The vast majority of law enforcement officers have no history of conduct or bias that would be subject to Brady-Giglio disclosure. The list here, however, is not exhaustive. It includes only those officers named as witnesses in pending cases. There might be other officers with credibility issues, some of whom may have committed misconduct that received public attention, that are not listed here because they are not currently witnesses in pending cases prosecuted by our office.

Whenever we make a Brady-Giglio disclosure, we will file a Notice of Disclosure in court and make that notice available to the public here by listing the officer, officer’s agency, court case number, date of notice filing, and a link to the court filing. A disclosure does not automatically prevent an officer from testifying at trial. We err on the side of disclosure in recognition of our unique constitutional duties, but it is a judge who ultimately decides whether or not the information has probative value for the jury.  Also, the number of cases listed for an officer is not necessarily an indication of the severity of their conduct, it is merely an indication of the number of pending cases they have with our office.