ETKS Partner Lawrence L. Kasperek to receive the 2014 Jeffrey A. Jacobs Memorial Award
Congratulations to our partner Larry Kasperek, the 2014 Jeffery A. Jacobs Memorial Award recipient. The award is to be presented on September 20, 2014 at the Defense Community Dinner at the Rochester Institute of Technology, sponsored by the Monroe County Public Defender’s Office and the New York State Defender’s Association. Jeff Jacobs is remembered as an outstanding attorney and person who was a fierce advocate for his clients and proud of having tried...
read moreProsecutors’ ethical obligations to comply with Brady; Managerial and Supervisory Obligations of Prosecutors under ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct 5.1 and 5.3
On September 8, 2014 the ABA released Formal Ethics Opinion #467 dealing with the Managerial and Supervisory Obligations of Prosecutors Under Rules 5.1 and 5.3. The opinion begins by noting that prosecutors “must ‘make timely disclosure to the defense’ of exculpatory and mitigating evidence” [emphasis added], contrary to the familiar prosecutorial mantra that “impeachment material is not Brady.” The opinion makes clear that “supervisors who directly oversee trial prosecutors must make reasonable efforts to...
read moreAnd speaking of Brady violations . . .
This article by Ernie Lewis, Executive Director, National Association for Public Defense: It’s time for another list. This time the focus is on prosecutors. Admit it, you have things you want to say about prosecutors. Please join in with your own. Of course, prosecutors come in all shapes and stripes. There are plenty of good ones and plenty of, well, not so good ones. But they all know, if they’re honest with themselves, the...
read more“The People are fully aware of their Brady obligations” – revisited
A recent Stanford Law Review article, “The Brady Colloquy” (http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/brady-colloquy), by visiting assistant professor Jason Kreag, “offers a decidedly low-tech, simple, and, to some, perhaps naive suggestion to address the problem of undisclosed Brady evidence: During pretrial hearings, and before a defendant enters a guilty plea, the court should ask the prosecutor a handful of questions on the record.” This procedure is proposed as a means to ameliorate the “distinctly vexing problem for the...
read moreJudicial notice of facts on appeal
May an appellate court take judicial notice of a fact for the first time on appeal where the trial court refused a party’s request to take judicial notice of the same fact, or even where the lower court was never asked to judicially notice that fact? The answer, somewhat counter-intuitively, is yes. In Handling a Criminal Case in New York § 23:35 [2013], Gary Muldoon notes that “[i]t is a basic tenet of appellate...
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