Troy Mansfield was charged with a crime he did not commit, and an especially heinous crime at that—sexual misconduct with a child. The prosecutors in his case were well aware of evidence highly corroborative of Mansfield’s innocence: specifically, that the alleged victim’s statements to prosecutors differed greatly from what she initially told police. Eventually, she disclaimed any memory of what had happened, alternatively suggesting to prosecutors that another child “might have done it.” In light of this information, the prosecutor concluded that the alleged victim could not testify at all, leaving the District Attorney’s office with no witnesses against Mansfield.

Nevertheless, in defiance of Brady v. Marland, which requires that prosecutors disclose material, exculpatory evidence to the defense, as well as a direct order from the state criminal court, the District Attorney’s office failed to turn over this information to Mansfield. Instead, the prosecutors offered a plea bargain of “only” 120 days, notwithstanding that Mansfield’s charges subjected him to a risk of life imprisonment. They even went so far as to lie about the strength of their evidence, claiming that the alleged victim (that they knew could not testify) was a “strong witness.” In light of such overwhelming pressure, Mansfield understandably took the deal.

Despite such blatant misconduct, the Fifth Circuit held below that Mansfield’s Brady claim was foreclosed by circuit precedent holding that the Brady rule does not apply at the plea-bargaining stage at all. The Fifth Circuit’s position is the minority position among other circuits and state courts, and Mansfield filed a cert petition asking the Supreme Court to clarify that the general due process protections articulated in Brady apply equally at the plea-bargaining stage as they do at trial and at sentencing. Cato filed an amicus brief in support of this petition explaining how failure to enforce the due process right to exculpatory evidence before entering a plea relates to and undermines a separate constitutional provision—the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial itself.

Under our Constitution, and within the Anglo-American legal tradition generally, the jury trial is the cornerstone of criminal adjudication. As long as there has been criminal justice in America, the independence of citizen jurors has been understood to be an indispensable structural check on executive, legislative power, and even judicial power. Yet as the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized, “criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.” Lafler v. Cooper, 566 U.S. 156, 170 (2012). Indeed, in the last year, 98.3% of federal criminal convictions were obtained from guilty pleas, not jury trials.

Mansfield’s petition discusses this startlingly high plea-bargaining rate, correctly explaining that—as nearly all criminal adjudications are done through pleas—Brady must apply during these proceedings for its due process protections to have any practical relevance to most defendants. But Cato’s brief focuses on a distinct but complementary point—that the practical elimination of modern jury trials is driven in large part by exactly the sort of coercive plea-bargaining tactics at issue in this case. In other words, ensuring that defendants receive exculpatory evidence before entering a guilty plea is essential not just to make plea bargaining fair, but to ensure that pleas are genuinely voluntary, and that defendants are not unlawfully coerced into abandoning their right to a jury trial in the first place. Granting the petition and holding that Brady applies during pre-trial plea negotiations would therefore be a small but vital safeguard against the wholesale erosion of the jury trial itself.