In a friend-of-the-court brief filed Monday, the ethicists urged the high court to reverse a decision by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s top criminal court, that held that due process was not jeopardized by the prosecution’s failure to correct Sneed’s testimony.
The scholars — Nora Freeman Engstrom, Bruce A. Green, Peter A. Joy, W. Bradley Wendel, Ronald F. Wright and Ellen C. Yaroshefsky — said the state court assumed that prosecutors are not obligated to correct a witness’ false testimony when the statement was not deliberate, may not change the outcome of a trial, or when defense attorneys failed to expose the falsehood in cross-examination.
