The "Brady List" is a list of names of law enforcement officers with credibility concerns. It could be because officers have a history of dishonesty, criminal convictions or other issues. Recently, after years of working to keep it secret, Milwaukee County released its "Brady List" of nearly 200 names. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in collaboration with TMJ4 and Wisconsin Watch, just reported on their findings of the list and why it matters.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigative reporter and deputy editor Ashley Luthern talks with WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez about her reporting.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Thinking of the relationship of the "Brady List" to the district attorney's office, what was it like to get that information from the DA's office?
Ashley Luthern: This project is undertaken with media partners including Wisconsin Watch and TMJ4. Last year, Wisconsin Watch published a really great report that showed how inconsistent Brady Lists are maintained by district attorney's offices across the state. So in all 72 counties, you have different ways of prosecutors maintaining that information and disclosing it.
Some said they had no officers on the list. Others said that they didn't maintain a list at all. Others furnished a list. One of those who provided a list at the time was Milwaukee County. However, it was only officers who had been criminally charged or convicted of a criminal offense. And Brady materials can include any documented instance of credibility concerns, and so that would also include internal violations.
So in Milwaukee County, they had a subset of this list that they had withheld from the public for quite a while that related to internal violations of officers. Now to be clear, the DA's office said they always would provide that information to defense attorneys when those officers were involved in cases. But for us as reporters and members of the public, we weren't sure who was on it. And frankly, neither in some cases were the officers.
So those two groups, the defense attorneys and the police unions, both are quite concerned about the standards that are used to have people placed on the list, how long people stay on the list and if there's ever an opportunity for officers to contest their placement on the list.
And so when the DA's office did finally release their full Brady list in September of last year, they released it with a lot of caveats, one of them being they couldn't guarantee the accuracy of all the information on the list, and that included whether officers were still employed with those agencies, that included whether or not they had been convicted of specific offenses.
And so my colleagues at TMJ and Wisconsin Watch and I, we spent five months requesting records underlying all of these officers, comparing it with past media coverage to really try to figure out how these people ended up on the list.
Over the last five months, as you put together that list and conducted all the shoe-leather reporting, I’m sure you came across some surprises—either in the findings or in the process itself. What stood out to you on the list, and have you heard anything from officials?
I think what surprised us was how inconsistent it was. At least five officers on the list were now deceased. They had been deceased for quite a while, so that raised questions for us as to how often this information is reviewed kind of independently by the DA's office. There was an officer who was listed as having been involved with a custody death. He was not. We found no evidence that he had been involved with that. He had a different kind of integrity concern, but not a custody death, as was listed on the DA's list. At least two officers were listed with the wrong agencies.
And some of this might sound a little nit-picky to some, but this is a public record that is critically important to ensuring people have a fair trial. Because ultimately, what this all is about is that there is enough information for someone to consider their defense because they are facing a loss of their liberty. They are facing possible incarceration time if they are charged with a crime.
And just because an officer's on the Brady list doesn't mean that that information automatically comes into a courtroom. There's still other layers of review. A defense attorney has to look at it and say, this actually might help in this specific case. And then if they decide that they have to take it to a judge, and then a judge decides if it's relevant or not. But none of that can happen unless there is an adequate record of these integrity concerns that are raised in the first place. It's sort of like trying to know an unknown. You have to have the information as a starting point.
Considering credibility concerns and the fact that officers are often the primary witnesses, how can officers remain employed or employable if they are on the Brady list—given that these credibility issues could jeopardize their ability to do their job and testify in court?
We asked Police Chief Jeff Norman and Sheriff Denita Ball what they would say to community members who are concerned about people being on the Brady list and currently still being employed with their agencies. As best as we can tell, with the public records we were able to obtain and answer from these different agencies, there are about 190 law enforcement officers in Milwaukee County and some of them (at least two dozen) remain employed as law enforcement. And the response from the police chief and the sheriff was: people can make a mistake.
The Brady List does appear to encompass quite a wide range of behavior. For example, there's an officer who's listed who cheated on an exam by writing on his hand. That goes to integrity. Does that mean that a person can never serve as a police officer? At the far, far end of the other spectrum are the officers who were federally convicted of civil rights crimes for beating Frank Jude. And obviously those Frank Jude officers have long not been employed.
And from the perspective of law enforcement, what they were explaining to us is that they weigh each individual case. They look at the seriousness of the infraction. In the case of Chief Norman, he looks at an officer's work history. He looks at the facts of the current case, he looks at similar discipline, and he gets input from the rest of his command staff before he makes a disciplined decision.
If the District Attorney's office were to tell him, he said that an officer's testimony would never be used in that case, he said he would have no choice but to make sure that that person was no longer with the agency. That situation, sometimes referred to as being
"Giglio," that's named after another Supreme Court case, happens pretty rarely, according to District Attorney Kent Lovern.
He said in his recollection, and in the past 18 years, there maybe were three people who he would absolutely never call them to testify. And they all have not been in law enforcement for many, many, many, many years.
You've been covering crime and public safety in the city for a long time, but you were also working with TMJ4 and Wisconsin Watch out of Madison. What was the dynamic of that group process—coming together and sifting through all this information and these documents over the last five months—to produce the reporting we see now?
I think this process has shown the power of collaboration. We all tell stories in slightly different ways, and it really was helpful to have so many people reviewing information and going off and getting public records. We were getting records from police agencies, from courthouses. We were looking up old archival newspaper coverage, TV coverage, and going through hundreds and maybe even thousands of pages of records. And to do that in a relatively short amount of time, five months, is only possible when you have other people working on it with you.
What do you expect to come after this reporting and what can we expect from your reporting going forward?
I want to be very clear that District Attorney Kent Lovern has been very open to receiving the information that we provided as a result of the information and questions that we raised. He ultimately removed seven people from the Brady list.
He also notably said that there was an individual who we brought to his attention who should have been placed on the Brady list years earlier, and because of that, his office is currently reviewing any case in which that officer was a state's witness and anyone who was convicted in those cases. They are now notifying that individual and their attorney so that they can decide if that factors into any further litigation they want to undergo.
By the same token, you'll see in further reporting we have found other cases where officers have been deemed to have lied or not told the whole truth when they were in court, in a civil proceeding or a criminal proceeding. And some of those officers are not on the list. And the district attorney has held firm in his decision on that. We'll be exploring that in further articles.
And so I expect a conversation about what the purpose of this list is, how it's maintained, and if there should be broader standards — not just in Milwaukee County, but statewide — for how this information is compiled, including who is placed on a list and how it is ultimately presented to the public.
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