Rachel Moran, associate professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, recently spoke with St. Louis Public Radio about advocating for police hiring reforms after misconduct by Illinois officer Sean Grayson, showing errors in responsibility and oversight.
From the story:
Police accountability and legal experts who reviewed multiple internal misconduct investigations involving Grayson, including Adkins’ dropped criminal case, say Grayson’s misconduct should have sounded alarm bells in Illinois law enforcement long before he applied to work at the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office. ...
Once the Christian County State’s Attorney’s Office became aware of the video and other evidentiary issues, they also had a responsibility to at least write a report documenting the issues in Adkins’ case, said Rachel Moran, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.
“If the prosecutor decided to dismiss the case because of Grayson’s untruthfulness/misconduct, then they have an obligation to document that and disclose it in the future,” she wrote in an email, pointing to prosecutors’ obligations under decades-old Supreme Court precedent in the cases Brady v. Maryland and U.S. v. Giglio.
A request for comment to the Christian County State’s Attorney’s Office about why the case was dropped, and whether a report had been created, went unreturned.
However, the responsibility of the state’s attorney in Christian County ends there, Moran said – because Grayson moved to the jurisdiction of other prosecutors.
“Neither Brady nor any other Supreme Court precedent says the prosecutor has a duty to share this information with other agencies, and I’m not aware of any Illinois law requiring this either,” wrote Moran, a former Illinois state appellate defender who has studied prosecutors’ legal obligations under these Supreme Court rulings.
