EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Brady Rule May Hurt the Innocent

Nuno Garoupa and Matteo Rizzolli

American Law and Economics Review, 2011, vol. 13, issue 1, 168-200

Abstract: Mandatory disclosure of evidence (the so-called Brady rule) is considered to be among the most important bulwarks against prosecutorial misconduct. While protecting the generality of defendants in the criminal process, we show that under certain reasonable assumptions this procedural mechanism may hurt innocent defendants by inducing prosecutors to adjust their behavior to their detriment. The main rationale for our thesis is that, if forced to reveal exculpatory information, the prosecutor might not look for that information in the first place, and in turn this could harm the innocent under certain reasonable conditions. We extensively discuss our results in the context of the economic literature on criminal procedure. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/ahq018 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:13:y:2011:i:1:p:168-200

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

American Law and Economics Review is currently edited by J.J. Prescott and Albert Choi

More articles in American Law and Economics Review from American Law and Economics Association Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:13:y:2011:i:1:p:168-200