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Most people outside the criminal justice system have never heard of a 1963 Supreme Court case called Brady v. Maryland. Brady creates personal legal responsibilities that prosecutors can’t escape—obligations that can’t be overridden by orders from political appointees, and that attach to every case where a government witness testifies.
What Brady Requires
The Brady case itself was straightforward enough. John Brady was convicted of murder in Maryland. His lawyers had asked to see statements from Brady’s companion, who’d been with him during the crime. Prosecutors showed them some statements but withheld one—the one where the companion admitted to doing the actual killing.
Brady got the death penalty. The withheld statement came out later, during post-conviction proceedings.
The Supreme Court’s holding reads simply: prosecutors must disclose evidence favorable to the accused when that evidence is material to guilt or punishment. The obligation exists regardless of whether the prosecution acted in good faith or bad faith.
In 1972, Giglio v. United States held that prosecutors must disclose information that could challenge the truthfulness of government witnesses. This transformed Brady from a rule about suppressing evidence into a rule about witness credibility—about making sure juries get information they need to evaluate whether the government’s witnesses are truthful.
When a government witness has a history of dishonesty, or received benefits in exchange for testimony, or has credibility problems documented in internal affairs investigations, that information must be disclosed. Even if the defendant never asks for it.
This meant prosecutors must actively search for this evidence—not just disclose evidence they personally knew about, but seek out evidence held by law enforcement agencies working with them.
Brady became a rule about what prosecutors should know—what they can be charged with knowing based on reasonable efforts to learn what their law enforcement partners possess.
The Difference Between Discretion and Duty
Prosecutors have broad discretion to decline to prosecute. They can decline charges they believe aren’t supported by probable cause, or where justice wouldn’t be served by prosecution, or where limited resources require prioritizing more serious cases.
Brady obligations operate differently. Brady concerns investigation and disclosure, not charging decisions.
Consider what happens six months after the Good shooting. Federal prosecutors bring an immigration enforcement case. ICE agent Jonathan Ross—the agent who fired the fatal shots—testifies as a government witness about an arrest he made, a location he searched, facts he observed.
The moment Ross testifies, Brady applies. Prosecutors must disclose any evidence that could challenge his credibility, including information about how he handled the Good incident—whether his accounts were accurate and whether his conduct raised questions about his judgment or truthfulness.
If prosecutors made no investigation into the Good shooting, they may have no knowledge of whether Ross’s conduct during that incident would undermine his credibility. Without investigation, prosecutors cannot know.
Prosecutors can’t be expected to disclose information they don’t know exists. But if they deliberately choose not to investigate—if they foreclose investigation to avoid discovering evidence they’d then be obligated to disclose—are they evading Brady obligations through willful ignorance?
Career prosecutors who resigned appear to have concluded: yes.
How Brady Works in Practice
In federal prosecutions and many state prosecutions, the prosecution team has explicit duties to review law enforcement officers’ personnel files and internal discipline records to identify information that could help the defendant or challenge witness credibility. These are required steps to follow Brady rules, not optional investigations.
Officers create Brady issues through their conduct as law enforcement. Once that conduct becomes known—once an investigation reveals something about an officer’s truthfulness, bias, or credibility—Brady applies.
What happens when prosecutors decide not to investigate police misconduct in the first place?
The Office of Professional Responsibility at the Department of Justice addressed a version of this question in a 2021 investigative summary. A U.S. Attorney’s Office had failed to disclose a law enforcement memorandum to the defense. The memo documented an interview that corroborated the defense’s theory and challenged the credibility of a critical prosecution witness.
Despite judicial findings that the government violated Brady, OPR concluded the prosecutors hadn’t engaged in intentional or reckless misconduct. The failure “primarily resulted from an unanticipated failure in how prosecutors and law enforcement tracked and shared evidence for meeting the government’s disclosure obligations to the defense.”
Brady violations often stem not from intentional suppression but from systemic failures in investigation and communication. These problems compound when investigation never occurs in the first place. Without investigation, information that would undermine future witnesses never enters the system at all.
The Specific Problem with Not Investigating the Good Shooting
The Good incident involved multiple officers, multiple perspectives on what happened, and video evidence that different observers have analyzed in conflicting ways. Federal prosecutors bringing future immigration cases might need to call some of those same agents as witnesses to establish facts about targeted locations, migration patterns, or enforcement operations.
The moment those agents testify, Brady obligations apply to each prosecutor personally. Prosecutors must disclose any evidence that could challenge their credibility—including information about how they handled the Good incident, whether their accounts were accurate, and whether their conduct raised questions about their judgment or truthfulness.
If prosecutors deliberately chose not to investigate the Good shooting, they may claim ignorance of this information. Does prosecutorial ignorance, deliberately created through the decision not to investigate, satisfy Brady?
What if a directive comes from above telling prosecutors not to investigate—not to review, not to identify, not to establish procedures for learning what evidence exists?
Career prosecutors who resigned appear to have concluded that such a directive puts them personally in the position of violating Brady. Brady obligations apply to each prosecutor personally. When federal prosecutors bring charges in a case, those prosecutors are responsible for Brady compliance. They can’t delegate that responsibility away.
If they knowingly failed to investigate when investigation was necessary to identify information that could help the defendant or challenge witness credibility, they’ve violated their Brady obligations.
Why This Creates a Systemic Problem
Beyond implications for specific future prosecutions involving officers from the Good incident, the broader decision not to investigate officer misconduct creates a systemic Brady problem.
Federal agents testify in hundreds of cases annually. Immigration agents appear in prosecutions involving immigration violations, trafficking, drug smuggling, and other federal crimes. If prosecutors make a policy decision not to investigate federal agent misconduct, Brady violations could happen across the entire federal prosecution system.
Brady concerns the integrity of the entire criminal justice system. When prosecutors fail to disclose evidence that could challenge government witnesses’ credibility, they’re corrupting jury verdicts, undermining the legitimacy of convictions, and betraying the public’s interest in fair trials.
A 2024 study analyzing Brady violations found that 49% of cases where courts agreed Brady was violated involved homicides. In more than one-third (34%) of all cases, evidence that prosecutors withheld supported both the defendant’s innocence and undermined the prosecution’s case theory or witnesses’ credibility. In 45% of cases, the withheld evidence could have challenged the credibility of a critical prosecution witness.
Federal agents serve as critical witnesses in federal prosecutions, and their credibility is often central to cases. Immigration agents testify about what they observed during raids, searches, and arrests. Investigators testify about their techniques, their interviews with witnesses, the evidence they collected.
When prosecutors decline to investigate whether federal agents violated constitutional rights—specifically, whether they violated Renée Good’s constitutional rights—they decline to investigate information that could challenge those agents in future prosecutions. How the agents handled the Good incident speaks to their credibility as witnesses generally, raising questions about whether they used appropriate judgment and whether their version of events matches video evidence.
Brady assumes prosecutors will discover, through proper investigation, that government witnesses have credibility problems. Prosecutors then have choices: disclose the information and call the witness, allowing cross-examination on the issue; disclose the information and decline to call the witness; or in rare circumstances, seek court protection for sensitive information through appropriate procedures.
Brady doesn’t permit prosecutors to avoid discovery by foreclosing investigation. Brady demands that prosecutors conduct investigations thorough enough that they’ll discover credibility problems when they exist.
What Made This a Constitutional Crisis
Career prosecutors who resigned weren’t protesting a charging decision. They were protesting the decision that there would be no investigation at all—no preliminary review of evidence, no examination of what happened, no systematic gathering of information that would generate evidence about Ross and the other officers involved.
One FBI supervisor with the Minneapolis Field Office, Tracee Mergen, resigned specifically citing pressure “to stop or downgrade the investigation” into Renée Good’s death. Her resignation suggests that an investigation had begun—the standard protocol for federal officer-involved shootings—but was then terminated or reclassified before completion.
This procedural detail matters. An investigation that begins but is stopped before completion may have partially gathered information about what happened, about officers’ conduct, about evidence that would inform Brady determinations. If that investigation is suppressed or discontinued, Brady violations become more likely.
For decades, the Civil Rights Division has maintained processes and procedures for investigating federal officer-involved shootings. These investigations aren’t primarily about prosecuting officers. They’re about determining whether officers violated constitutional rights and, if so, ensuring that those constitutional violations are disclosed in any future case where those officers testify. These investigations serve Brady compliance.
When leadership abruptly directs that no investigation will occur, career prosecutors encounter a situation that’s difficult to reconcile with Brady obligations. Several senior prosecutors and an FBI official who oversaw investigations cited their concern that normal investigative procedures were being abandoned in ways that would undermine prosecutors doing their job honestly and fairly and Brady compliance. One statement from a former Civil Rights Division leader characterized such investigations as part of the division’s core mission: “Investigating officials to determine if they broke the law, defied policy, didn’t try to calm the situation, and used deadly force without basis is one of the civil rights division’s most solemn duties.”
Resignation serves as a statement itself. A prosecutor who is directed to violate Brady obligations faces a professional responsibility problem. Ethics rules that all lawyers must follow impose on prosecutors the duty to “make timely disclosure to the defense of all evidence or information known to the prosecutor that tends to negate the guilt of the accused or reduces the seriousness of the crime.”
If a political appointee directs a prosecutor to skip investigation in a way that hides evidence that could help the defendant or challenge witness credibility, the prosecutor faces pressure to either violate the rule or resign.
Career prosecutors who resigned were signaling that they couldn’t ethically continue in positions where they were being asked to forgo investigations that would normally be needed for Brady compliance. These resignations communicate to the defense bar, the judiciary, and other prosecutors that the standard protocols for identifying evidence about federal officers weren’t being followed. This communication itself serves an important function—it alerts defense attorneys to the possibility that evidence may not be in prosecutors’ files because no investigation occurred, creating an invitation for defense discovery motions.
How Brady Limits Executive Power
The Brady analysis of the Good case resignations raises a larger question about how much power the President has over prosecutors’ legal duties.
Presidents and Attorneys General possess genuine authority over prosecutorial decisions within the executive branch. They can set enforcement priorities, directing resources toward certain categories of crimes and away from others. They can set charging policies. They can decline to authorize prosecutions that their branch’s prosecutors believe are warranted.
Yet Brady might limit that power in ways that haven’t been fully tested. Brady obligations apply to each prosecutor personally. Each prosecutor is responsible for Brady compliance in each case they handle. If an Attorney General or Assistant Attorney General directs prosecutors to forgo investigations in a manner that violates prosecutors’ personal Brady obligations, are prosecutors constitutionally required to disobey?
These resignations suggest that career prosecutors believed the answer is yes—that Brady obligations can’t be overridden by executive directive.
The closest case may be Connick v. Thompson (2011), a Supreme Court case about prosecutor training. The Court held that a district attorney’s office couldn’t be held liable for a single Brady violation based on failure to train, emphasizing that prosecutors are “ethically bound to know what Brady entails and to perform legal research when they are uncertain.”
This language suggests that individual prosecutors bear responsibility for Brady compliance regardless of whether their office provided training. Connick emphasized that prosecutors are educated professionals presumed to know their Brady obligations. The decision doesn’t directly address whether prosecutors can be directed to forgo investigations that would generate evidence.
These resignations from the Civil Rights Division represent an implicit assertion that Brady creates such a constraint. Career prosecutors appear to have determined that they couldn’t ethically and constitutionally comply with a directive not to investigate the Good shooting because doing so would prevent identification of evidence about the officers involved, creating Brady violations in future prosecutions.
What Happens Next
The implications of the decision not to investigate the Good shooting will likely emerge gradually, through the normal course of federal prosecutions. As federal immigration enforcement continues, ICE agents and Border Patrol officers who were present at or involved in the Good incident will continue to serve as government witnesses in prosecutions.
Defense attorneys will inevitably seek information about officers’ conduct during the Good shooting, arguing that it bears on credibility and witness reliability. These defense discovery motions will trigger Brady issues directly. When a defense attorney argues that an officer’s conduct during the Good incident raises questions about his judgment, truthfulness, or bias, prosecutors will need to either disclose what they know about that conduct or successfully argue that Brady doesn’t require disclosure.
If prosecutors genuinely conducted no investigation into the Good incident, they may face claims that they’ve deliberately withheld evidence by avoiding investigation.
Congressional interest in the Good case and the DOJ decision not to investigate suggests that these Brady questions may receive official attention. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have demanded that the Department of Justice produce documents identifying who made the decision not to investigate and why, including communications with the White House and Department of Homeland Security.
If congressional investigation produces evidence that prosecutors were directed not to investigate specifically to avoid discovering information that could help the defendant or challenge witness credibility, that evidence could inform judicial determinations about Brady compliance.
If federal prosecutors systematically decline to investigate federal officer misconduct—if this becomes institutional policy rather than a decision in a single case—prosecutors across the entire system can’t follow Brady rules. Prosecutors can’t satisfy Brady when they’re institutionally prevented from investigating. This creates a profound tension between executive authority over prosecutorial decision-making and prosecutors’ constitutional obligations to ensure fair trials through Brady compliance.
Conclusion
These resignations from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division over the decision not to investigate the Good shooting represent career prosecutors’ assertion that Brady v. Maryland creates constitutional obligations that political appointees can’t override through directives not to investigate.
Brady is often discussed in the context of individual trials—cases where prosecutors withheld evidence and courts later reversed convictions. Brady is also, fundamentally, a rule about investigation, disclosure obligations, and the systemic integrity of criminal prosecution.
When federal prosecutors decline to investigate federal officer misconduct, they don’t merely exercise prosecutorial discretion about charging decisions. They potentially violate Brady obligations that will affect future prosecutions involving those officers for years to come. They systematically prevent themselves from learning information that Brady later requires them to disclose. They create a situation where prosecutors can’t satisfy Brady’s demands because investigation was foreclosed before evidence could be identified.
The significance of these resignations lies in their communication to the defense bar, the judiciary, and other prosecutors that Brady obligations weren’t being fulfilled. That evidence wasn’t being generated or reviewed. That future prosecutions involving federal officers from the Good incident may carry Brady exposure.
These resignations demonstrate that Brady, despite its apparent simplicity from the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision, has evolved into a complex and demanding constitutional obligation. One that reaches prosecutors personally and individually. One that constrains executive authority over prosecutorial decisions. One that demands investigations that generate the information necessary for prosecutors to satisfy their constitutional obligations to ensure fair trials. And one that prosecutors, when forced to choose between their Brady obligations and directives from political appointees, may conclude they cannot compromise.
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