SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?
Thomas Dybdahl: The Brady rule, the legal requirement that in a criminal case prosecutors must disclose favorable evidence to the defense, was intended to make sure trials were fair. But in the decades since it was enacted in 1963, prosecutors have regularly failed to comply with the rule; sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. And judges have been reluctant to enforce it.
As a result, prosecutorial misconduct — hiding favorable evidence — has become the single leading cause of wrongful convictions in this country. Of 2,400 documented exonerations between 1989 and 2019, Brady violations helped to convict 44%: 1,056 innocent people.
As a public defender in Washington, D.C., I saw prosecutors routinely break the rule, and judges routinely look the other way. I wrote this book to focus attention on the problem, and to show how we can fix it. It tells the winding history of the Brady rule through the cases that created and defined it. The book is anchored by the odyssey of the Catherine Fuller murder case, which shows just how easily Brady violations occur, how difficult they are to uncover, and the terrible human cost they exact.