Is Motion to Seek Evidence in Simpson Case Too Broad? : Law: Defense wants information that might help client. Prosecutors will argue that the request is too sweeping.

Thirty-one years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court laid down the law: Prosecutors have to give defendants any information that could help exonerate them.

Since then, “Brady motions”--named after the landmark Brady vs. Maryland decision--have become a central element in criminal law in the United States.

Thousands are filed every year but none so widely watched as the one scheduled to be heard this morning in the O.J. Simpson murder case.

At issue is Simpson’s defense lawyers’ sweeping request that the district attorney’s office immediately disclose any exculpatory investigative leads. It will be up to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito to determine the breadth of the prosecution’s obligation.

Brady motions are filed routinely and some are mere fishing expeditions. But in several important cases they have led to stunning outcomes: Charges have been dropped and convictions reversed when defense lawyers could show that prosecutors failed to turn over critical information--even if it was a good-faith mistake.

In the Simpson case, the defense is asking for a lot: six months worth of police reports on prowlers or burglaries in the Brentwood neighborhood where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were murdered; “all police reports of unsolved similar murders in California in the past year”; all investigative leads concerning the backgrounds of associates of the victims; any records of people who were treated for cuts or dog bites at nearby hospital emergency rooms in the 24 hours after the murders; a computer match of any unidentified fingerprints found at the murder scene, and any other potentially exculpatory leads.

Simpson’s attorneys also are seeking personnel records of the detectives in the case, in part to determine whether there has been any disciplinary action taken against them and in part to establish whether any of them had reasons to bear a grudge against Simpson.

One piece of information that would appear to fall within the scope of the request is a Jan. 19, 1989, letter by LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman, who discovered a key piece of evidence in the Simpson case. The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, details a previous meeting Fuhrman had with the former football star and Nicole Simpson, then his wife.

In his letter, Fuhrman said he had responded to a family dispute at Simpson’s home in late 1985. When he arrived, Fuhrman said, he found O.J. Simpson in the driveway and his wife sitting near a car and sobbing. According to Fuhrman, she told him her husband had bashed in the windshield with a baseball bat. Upon hearing this, Simpson said: “I broke the windshield. . . . It’s mine. . . . There’s no trouble here,” according to Fuhrman’s letter.

When he testified during the preliminary hearing in the current case, Fuhrman said he had been to the Hall of Famer’s house in 1985, but he was not asked to elaborate. The 1989 letter was apparently written at the request of the city attorney’s office, which was then preparing a case against Simpson in connection with a Jan. 1, 1989, allegation of abuse--one to which he eventually pleaded no contest.

“It seems odd to remember such an event, but it is not every day that you respond to a celebrity’s home for a family dispute,” Fuhrman concluded in his letter. “For this reason this incident was indelibly pressed in my memory.”

Because the letter indicates that Fuhrman knew of Simpson’s troubled relationship with his ex-wife, it could help defense attorneys who tried during the preliminary hearing to show that detectives believed Simpson was a suspect when they went to his home. Fuhrman and the other LAPD detectives said they did not suspect Simpson at that time but merely went to his home to tell him that his ex-wife had been killed and that his children were at the police station.

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., one of Simpson’s attorneys, said the Fuhrman letter raises questions about whether the detective was lying when he said he did not consider Simpson a suspect when he and other investigators went to Simpson’s estate hours after the murders.

“Believe you me, I think you’ll find that we will be pursuing that,” Cochran said Thursday.

In addition to its formal discovery request, the defense also has made a lengthy informal discovery request to prosecutors. In it, Simpson’s lead lawyer, Robert L. Shapiro, asked for records of any statements made by police to Simpson or others to encourage the former Heisman Trophy winner to cooperate with authorities.

That request seems to indicate that the defense may attempt to challenge the admissibility of a statement Simpson made to the police the day after the murders.

In California, a section of the Penal Code delineates information that must be disclosed by the prosecution--including statements made by defendants, all relevant evidence obtained as part of the investigation, the existence of a felony conviction of any key witness, experts’ reports and the results of scientific tests.

The Brady doctrine applies not only to the conduct of attorneys, but also to police officers and others working with them. For example, in 1992, 17 years after being convicted of murdering a deputy sheriff, two Los Angeles men--Clarence Chance and Benny Powell--were released from prison after investigators discovered that the two may have been framed by overzealous investigators for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Among other things, the investigators found that during a 1975 trial, the police had withheld from prosecutors and the defense information that a jailhouse informant who testified against Chance and Powell may have been lying and had implicated others in the crime.

“It was a classic Brady violation,” said Los Angeles lawyer Sandra E. Smith, one of the attorneys for the pair. “It’s just as egregious to have exculpatory information withheld when the prosecuting attorneys don’t know, as when they do.”

The Supreme Court decision involved John L. Brady, who was sentenced to death for robbery and murder. When he appealed, his lawyers found that prosecutors failed to disclose that an accomplice had confessed to the murder. Brady’s conviction was upheld, but his death sentence was overturned.

The basic standard that has evolved since Brady is that if the prosecution withholds information requested, a conviction must be reversed--or a penalty annulled--if the information is deemed “material,” meaning it might have affected the outcome of the trial.

Interpretation of the word “material” is hotly debated, though. In September, 1990, a Los Angeles federal judge dismissed payola and racketeering charges against record promoter Joseph Isgro of Glendale and two other men after learning that a veteran Justice Department lawyer concealed information that cast serious doubts on the merits of the case.

U.S. District Judge James M. Ideman ruled that a prosecutor had violated Isgro’s rights by failing to disclose that a key witness had, in an earlier case, provided testimony that flatly contradicted his statements in the later case. An appeals court reversed Ideman, saying Isgro’s rights had not been materially prejudiced because the information had been discovered before the witness testified and thus it could be used to impeach him.

In the Simpson case, defense attorneys contend that the prosecution’s obligation is very broad and should include disclosure of information that has even the slightest potential of clearing Simpson.

That is particularly important, the defense team said, in a case where “the prosecutor (Marcia Clark) has publicly committed herself very early in the investigation to a theory of the evidence which excludes the possibility of innocence,” and therefore “the exculpatory potential of evidentiary leads may be cursorily dismissed.”

Deputy Dist. Attys. Clark, William Hodgman and Cheri Lewis acknowledge in a response motion their duty to turn over relevant, helpful information to Simpson.

For example, they say “if and when” any fingerprints found at the crime scene are matched by computer, “we will provide that information to the defense as soon as a match is made.”

But the prosecutors contend that the rest of the defense request is much too broad, is not specific enough and fails to provide legally adequate grounds for the material it seeks. In regard to the request for information about “similar murders” the prosecutors ask, “All double homicides? All domestic violence murders?”

And in order to comply with the defense request for dog bite records, the prosecutors said they would have to trample on the privacy rights of hospital patients.

Moreover, Clark said, the California Supreme Court has ruled that there is “no general duty on prosecutorial officials to serve as defense investigators.”

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said that is a critical point. “While we consider it a fundamental requirement of due process of law for the prosecutor to give the defendant information that would tend to exonerate him, that does not mean the prosecutor has to take over the role of the defense lawyer or one of his investigators.”

Indeed, numerous state and federal cases during the past 30 years have shown that the Brady decision does not require the disclosure of all evidence requested by the defendant, Levenson said. Cases have held that the government does not have to disclose speculative evidence, evidence available to the defense from other sources or evidence the prosecutor does not possess.

Perhaps most significant is that prosecutors are not required to open their files for “an open-ended fishing expedition,” in search of Brady material, Levenson added.

Several other legal experts said they believed the defense request was too broad.

Prominent defense lawyer Harland W. Braun questioned the demand for information on the victims’ associates. “That’s too sweeping,” Braun said. “Does that mean reports on every person who worked at Mezzaluna where Goldman was a waiter? Does that mean reports on every person who worked out at the gym Nicole went to?”

USC criminal law professor Charles Weisselberg said several of the defense requests would have to be more narrowly tailored and buttressed by a theory about how the murders occurred to have a chance of success.

Times staff writer Alan Abrahamson contributed to this story.