Across the state, prosecuting attorneys have called the credibility of nearly 100 cops into question, which could cause trouble with prosecuting cases relying on their testimony. Reporter Joshua Bowling with Searchlight New Mexico explored these issues recently in the article “Trouble with the law.” He spoke with KUNM.
BOWLING: This story started several months back. I met with some folks at the nonprofit MuckRock, that kind of oversees records request endeavors across the country and helps a number of newsrooms out with them. And they were putting on a training, kind of helping folks understand “Brady Lists”, which I explained in detail in the story, and it gives you a valuable window into why some cases, even high profile ones, maybe never really go anywhere. I think we've all had the experience of reading the paper or seeing something on social media, you see somebody's accused of a horrible crime, and then the case just kind of gets dropped, and you wonder like, ‘Well, why didn't that ever go anywhere?’ This can kind of give us a window into why sometimes a particular cop is involved, the DA’s office does not trust them for whatever reason. Some reasons that we get into in the story range from, you know, pretty minor standard operating procedures violations to pretty serious things like allegations of child pornography, DWIs, felony level crimes. So that's kind of the long and short of where this story came from.
KUNM: In your story, you talk about the Brady Lists. Can you explain to the audience what those are? It's a little complicated.
BOWLING: The long and short of what a Brady list is, or sometimes they're called Giglio lists, is that they are lists that your district attorney's office maintains internally, and it's kind of like if you ever go to a bar or a restaurant and you see a picture of like, do not serve this person, it's kind of like that where they have this list internally where prosecutors say, ‘Oh Officer so-and-so made this arrest. I really don't trust him, because I found him to be dishonest in the past, or to have these personnel violations, let's just not put them on the stand. Maybe we drop this case instead of pursuing it’. Now, the other side of that is that these are, of course, you know, internal lists, but these are also public records. These are maintained by the district attorney’s offices across the state, across the nation, every prosecuting attorney has something resembling a Brady List. And so several months ago, I determined that it seemed within the public's interest. So I kind of wanted to cut through all of the noise and make some sense of that broader cloud of information that's been hanging over us for the past several years, and really provide a public service that says, Okay, these are the cops that our DAs have determined our problems, here's why they've determined they're a problem, and go see for yourself. We categorized it geographically so that no matter what part of the state you're in, if you're down in Ruidoso or a small enough town where you maybe know that the officers who patrol your neighborhood now you can see very clearly and very directly if they have had any doubts cast on their reliability and why.
KUNM: How long have you been working on this piece?
BOWLING: This took about three or so months. The biggest part of reporting that had to happen with this was getting these lists from as many district attorneys’ offices across the state as we could. We have 14 in New Mexico, and, you know, some are much more responsive to public records requests than others. Some also have much bigger lists than others, and it's not always where there's a big population center. Obviously, the Bernalillo County District Attorney's office has a pretty sizable list, and that makes sense because we have the Albuquerque Police Department, Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office, you know, some of the largest law enforcement agencies in the state, but some of them, when you get down by Alamogordo, Ruidoso, some of these smaller towns across the state, their das offices actually had quite sizable lists. And the DAs office isn't, you know, quite as big as the ones up here that can really facilitate these records quickly. That is kind of a moving target, trying to get all of those lists from all of these different offices, but the list itself really isn't good enough to tell this story. You also need why the officer is on the list? And in a lot of cases, the DA’s office would pretty happily say, ‘Okay, well, here's our Brady list. You know, this is what you requested. Go ahead and take a look.’And it's really exactly what it sounds like, just a white piece of paper with black text that gives names and agencies and you don't know why this person is on the list. So then we had to go back and request the supporting material. Give me everything you have that tells me why this person is on the list. And that turned out to be many, many thousands of pages of records from across the state. It really took several months to report this out, because we have to spend time with all of those 1,000s of pages and, you know, the inconsequential stuff and the very serious allegations, we have to give those the same time of day when we're evaluating what to include in the story.
