GREENFIELD — According to Hancock County Prosecutor Brent Eaton, in order for a prosecutor in a jurisdiction to be able to perform duties for the community, the office must have full knowledge of all illegal activity. Eaton believes this includes any past offenses by a law enforcement officer who could one day testify in a case.
In Indiana, a person is generally prohibited from becoming a police officer if they “have a felony conviction, a serious misdemeanor conviction that casts doubt on their fitness for the role, have been discharged from a previous employer for reasons that would raise concerns about their suitability, or have a history of domestic violence convictions.”
By law, a prosecutor’s office must create something known as a Brady-Giglio list. The list is compiled by a prosecutor’s office and contains the names and details of law enforcement officers who have sustained incidents of untruthfulness, criminal convictions, candor issues, or some other type of issue placing their credibility into question.
“If a police officer had been convicted of a crime of dishonesty or found there has been a finding of dishonesty elsewhere, the prosecutor is responsible for it and is legally required to disclose it to a defense team,” Hancock County Prosecutor Brent Eaton said. “A failure to do so is something for which the prosecutor or deputy prosecutor can lose their law license over if they don’t disclose it.”
The Daily Reporter obtained a list of local officers who had been identified as being on the list, five of which either worked for or do work for the Greenfield Police Department (GPD). There is also one former officer on the list who used to work for the McCordsville Police Department but is no longer employed there.
For over a year now, Eaton says he’s been a stalemate with local law enforcement after he and his Chief Deputy Prosecutor Aimee Herring found out an officer with the GPD had a misdemeanor crime on his record which was not revealed to the GPD or the prosecutor’s office.
The information came after the officer had testified in numerous cases for the state. Eaton says the problem is that neither his office nor the defense were aware of that in any of those cases.
The information, once revealed, caused officials with the local prosecutor’s office to file legal documents in all of those cases. Following the incident, Eaton said he had no choice but to request officer background information on most law enforcement in the county to avoid the issue from happening again.
“On the officer who had been convicted of a crime of dishonesty and we were not told about it, so once we found out we had to go back and dig into records of 767 separate cases and determine which legal pleadings were necessary on each one,” Eaton said. “It was a monumental amount of work and time which prevented us from being able to perform other work at the same time.”
Officials with the GPD and some of the other county departments have balked at the notion of providing the prosecutor’s office with all police hiring background check information and details about an officer’s past. The request has created a rift between law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office.
“Yes, I’d say there is a stalemate,” GPD Chief of Police Brian Hartman said. “We’ve got an officer who is now on that Brady-Giglio list who had an issue when he was 18 years old and still in high school — almost 20 something years ago.”
That officer was hired with the GPD nine years later. Hartman, who was not the chief of police at the time of that hire noted he does not know why that information wasn’t disclosed back when the officer was hired in 2008. However, he said that the officer wasn’t put on any Brady-Giglio list 16 years ago, and he doesn’t think he should be on it now.
“He could not be more legally wrong with what he is saying,” Eaton said of Hartman’s view. “There is not discretion. We must disclose it or we are at risk of losing our license. Every case in which that officer is involved will not be sustained on appeal, it will not remain valid if we don’t disclose officer information.”
Hartman noted that the officer’s name was only presented to the current prosecutor, Eaton, after the officer had been working on a high-profile shooting case this year. Hartman believes that the information on the officer came from a former GPD officer who was fired for OWI and then shared the information with the prosecutor to hurt the police department.
“Our prosecutor found out about the officer’s misdemeanor arrest that occurred when he was 18 years old, nearly 20 years after the fact,” Hartman said. “But now, out of nowhere, this officer is on the Brady-Giglio list.”
City attorney Gregg Morelock noted there was nothing in the officer’s personal file showing he had committed a crime of dishonesty, theft, and the department would have never known had Eaton not received a tip on the issue.
“He was an accessory to a felony theft when he was a teenager, but he’s been on the force for what, some 20 years, and no one knew this existed. There was nothing in his personnel file, so no one knew anything about it,” Morelock said.
Morelock went on to say he understands that the prosecutor is simply trying to protect the integrity of his process in his cases and that prosecutors around the state are nervous due to other cases where officers either should have been on the list but were not or were on a list but the information about the officer was not disclosed to defense lawyers.
“Eaton decided to generate a letter asking for just a ton of stuff that, from our perspective and from lawyers from other town’s perspective, was not relevant to what he needed, so we respectively have declined to provide that information,” Morelock said.
Greenfield officials say they’re also upset because Eaton didn’t ask for the same information from the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office or the Indiana State Police, departments he also works with on a regular basis.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a situation where we needed to be questioned,” Sheriff Brad Burkhart said. “All I know is this situation between the Greenfield Police Department and the prosecutor’s office has been going on for some time now.”
Eaton noted that his office is simply following the letter of the law and making sure that, if there is a list and an officer is a witness in a case, the defense attorneys needs to know if the officer testifying has a past that could affect their case.
Jim Oliver is the Chief of Criminal Law at the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council and said prosecutors have an obligation to make sure convictions are fairly earned and that they will survive appeals, and they can’t do that if they don’t have all the information about arresting officers on hand.
“Prosecutors are obligated to turn over anything that is helpful to defense teams — anything that can be used to impeach a prosecutor’s witness,” Oliver said.
That, Oliver noted, includes a law enforcement officer who has any kind of criminal background on his record.
“The prosecutor under all case law is assumed to know everything that the police know because the state is the state,” Oliver said. “There is an obligation there both to the defendant on trial and an obligation under attorney ethical rules to turn over anything that can help the defense to assure trials are fair and we get just results, and that includes information on an officer involved in a case.”
A state attorney who regularly works on police cases told the Daily Reporter that this type of situation where officers are placed on a Brady-Giglio list is one that is evolving with many differing opinions about what the appropriate protocols for prosecutors alerting an officer that he’s been placed on a list.
“There does need to be various due process protections put in place, and it might end up being an issue before the Indiana General Assembly,” the attorney said.
Eaton said that he’s tried to keep the rift between his office and the police department quiet as they work on finding common ground. He says he’s trying to solve the issue. Eaton asked the Indiana Attorney General’s office to come in and talk to both sides about the importance of having the Brady-Giglio list and making officer background information available to the prosecutor’s office. Eaton noted an official from the AG office’s will be in to offer best practices surrounding the issue at the first of the year.
“Failure to get this resolved could impact the filing of future cases being at risk,” Eaton said. “All the prosecutor’s office wants is to be able to follow the law.”
