Documents, While Wrongly Withheld, Were Not Material to Conspiracy Conviction

US v. Blankenship: Blankenship was CEO of a coal mining company when an explosion in one of its mines killed 29 people. That led to an investigation of the mine, showing that it had a history of failed compliance with safety regulations and that Blankenship frequently pushed to up coal production rather than comply with those regulations. He was eventually charged with conspiring to violate those regulations and was convicted by a jury of that misdemeanor offense and was sentenced to a year in prison. After his conviction, the Government turned over additional documents which Blankenship claimed, in a 2255 motion, had been improperly withheld under Brady and Giglio. The district court agreed that the documents had been withheld improperly, but affirmed Blankenship’s conviction, concluding that they were not material to his conviction. 

On appeal, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the denial of Blankenship’s 2255 motion. As to one group of documents, interview notes for interviews of several other high-ranking employees in the company, the court concluded that Blankenship was not denied access to that evidence, as he had most of those employees on his own witness list. Thus, the “case falls squarely under the principle that the Brady doctrine is not available where the favorable information is available to the defendant and lies in a source where a reasonable defendant would have looked. As to the other group, internal regulatory agency documents that Blankenship alleged suggested bias in its investigations of him and the mine, the court concluded that judge because they were “unflattering” to the agency did not make them material to Blankenship’s prosecution, as none of the agency employees involved testified at trial or appeared to have any influence on the decision to prosecute Blankenship.