Garrett J. Ward v. Louisiana

Petitioner Garrett Ward, a 25-year-old with no criminal record, woke from a drunken sleep on the side of a street in New Orleans to find a stranger going through his pockets, which prompted him to strike the stranger twice and kick him once. Twelve days later, the man died and Mr. Ward was charged and tried for seconddegree murder. Before trial the defense invoked Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure article 716(B), which requires the State to give notice of any oral statement by the defendant that it intends to offer at trial. Five days before trial, the State provided a response and identified only innocuous statements Mr. Ward made to police officers. On the first day of testimony, the prosecutor asked a witness whom the State had interviewed the day before what Mr. Ward had said during the fight. She claimed that Mr. Ward used a racial epithet. The prosecutor asked the question a second time, and she repeated the slur. No other witness heard this slur, the witness’s own 911 call contained no such reference, and there was no reference to this type of language in any police report. The Louisiana courts denied relief on the grounds that the prosecutor professed not to have known the precise words the witness would use. The question presented is: Whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment permits a State to elicit, without pretrial notice, a witness’s previously undisclosed attribution of a racial epithet to the accused, where the accused had invoked the state’s own mandatory notice rule, the State omitted this statement from its written notice of the statements it intended to use at trial, and the prosecutor had interviewed the witness before she testified.