Her halting and unfocused presentation elicited one incredulous question after another. The argument culminated in back-to-back rebukes from Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
Justice Kagan said she could not understand why the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office persisted in defending its conduct. “Did your office ever consider just confessing error in this case?” she asked.
Justice Sotomayor made a broader point about the office, which has repeatedly been found to have violated Brady v. Maryland, the 1963 Supreme Court decision that requires prosecutors to turn over favorable evidence to the defense.
“There have been serious accusations against the practices of your office, not yours in particular, but prior ones,” Justice Sotomayor said. “It is disconcerting to me that when I asked you the question directly, should this material have been turned over, you gave an absolute no.”
“That’s really troubling,” Justice Sotomayor added.
The case, Smith v. Cain, No. 10-8145, arose from a mass murder in 1995, when a group of men burst into a house in search of money and drugs. They ordered the occupants to lie down and opened fire, killing five people.
Juan Smith was the only person tried for the killings. He was convicted based solely on the eyewitness testimony of a survivor, Larry Boatner. Prosecutors presented no DNA, fingerprint, weapons or other physical evidence.
Unknown to Mr. Smith’s lawyers, Mr. Boatner had said conflicting things in interviews with the police. Just after the shootings, he said he could not describe the intruders except to say they were black men. A few hours later, he mentioned “a black male with a low cut, gold in his mouth,” a description that matched Mr. Smith and five other suspects.
Five days later, Mr. Boatner told a police officer that he had not seen the intruders’ faces and could not identify them.
Ms. Andrieu said the failure to turn Mr. Boatner’s statements over to the defense did not violate the Brady decision because the jury would have discounted them. Almost every justice appeared to disagree.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, “If you were the defense lawyer, you really would like to have that statement where he said: ‘I couldn’t identify them.’ ”
Justice Antonin Scalia said of the evidence, “Of course it should have been turned over.”
As her argument wound down, Ms. Andrieu retreated slightly, saying that a prudent prosecutor might have voluntarily turned over the materials. “Today we turn over all of this,” she said.
Kannon K. Shanmugam, a lawyer for Mr. Smith, was questioned only lightly. He said the Brady violations in the case had been flagrant and egregious.