Every prosecutor is supposed to know and adhere to the law announced by the United States Supreme Court in their decision, Brady v. Maryland. How many actually do only God, Himself, actually knows. I only know that I didn’t in the re-trial of Marcos Duendes for the attempted murder of Dr. Robert Uglisky.

In Brady v. Maryland, our nation’s highest court declared that prosecuting attorneys MUST provide a criminal defendant with all exculpating or, even, potentially exculpating evidence because our form of government requires that they do so as their highest constitutional duty to provide “due process of law.”

Most people hate the idea that this type of due process can end up preventing clearly guilty people from being convicted of their crimes. Most people think that our government’s highest duty is to protect innocent people from the criminals who live among us.

Most people are wrong.

Our government’s highest constitutional duty is to protect “we the people” from an oppressive form of government because the men and women who had founded our nation had once risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor rebelling against a tyrant king who would, if he could, have gladly sent each of our founding fathers and mothers to hang from their necks until almost dead, sliced open their midsections before a jeering mob whilst ripping our their entrails, chopped off each of their limbs one by one and finally severed their heads from their torsos to mount upon the King’s Gate for all the world to see and fear. Then everything these good people had ever owned would have been forfeited to the Crown and their offspring left in ruin, along with whatever good reputation in the community they once had made.

And THAT is why our nation’s founding documents protects the rights of those accused of crimes and would rather suffer ten guilty persons to go free than for one innocent person be convicted. The occasional criminal who gets away with his or her crime is nothing compared to the horrible crimes against humanity that a tyrant unrestrained by laws can commit upon millions and millions of people.

In light of THAT understanding of our law, our Supreme Court held that if the government withholds information favorable to an accused person that is material to the issues of either guilt or punishment, then the government itself has denied the accused person the due process of law vouchsafed by our constitution to which all lawyers swear an oath to uphold.

So the fact that I never told Marcos Duendes’ defense attorney what Priscilla Duendes told me the night she came to my office after work when Marcos Duendes was sitting in jail during his retrial; namely, that she and Dr. Ugliski had had an affair after Dolores had been born before Marcos became enraged with jeolousy wrongly suspecting that Dr. Ugliski had “raped” Pricilla during obstetric exams like she had testified at the first trial and that slanderous accusation almost ruined the poor man and I didn’t think that the man’s wife and family deserved to go through more agony after Dr. Ugliski actually had killed himself on the eve of the retrial completely unhinged by the thought that the retrial was going to rehash that garbage in the community where his children were being raised . . . that was my decision to make and mine alone, right?

Wrong.

[DISCLAIMER: NONE OF THIS IS REAL. I MADE IT ALL UP. I ALREADY TOLD YOU THAT. STOP ASKING IF IT REALLY HAPPENED. THE ANSWER IS, “NO, IT NEVER HAPPENED . . . DAMMIT!”]