ORLANDO, Fla. — Law enforcement officers will find out next week if they have been flagged by the state attorney's office as problems for prosecution.
Police chiefs and sheriffs in Orange and Osceola counties met Thursday morning with State Attorney Aramis Ayala to ask questions about a new policy called a Brady list.
Prosecutors all over the country use these lists while deciding whether an officer would make a reliable witness in court.
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Most times, the lists include officers who are under investigation for improper conduct, lying or even excessive force.
The main concern for law enforcement is that cases involving officers who are on these lists could end up being dropped.
The state attorney's office says there are two lists on which these law enforcement officers could find themselves: one where prosecutors will use caution when calling the law enforcement officer to court and one that means they will be automatically excluded.
What that means is both of those lists could lead to dropped cases, and from the response from the police chiefs, it seems they still have some unanswered questions.
Law enforcement officers who may find themselves on the lists include officers who are fired and rehired by their departments through the arbitration process or officers like Robert Shellhorn, who twice was under investigation by the Orlando Police Department for calling people "savages" once online and once on body camera video.
Ayala will have a Brady committee that will review the information and determine if those officers should be on a Brady alert list or a Brady exclusion list.
Ayala is not on the committee.
As some of the chiefs left the meeting Thursday, they said the meeting went well. But last week, Orange County Sheriff John Mina had some concerns with some names of law enforcement officers being made public.
“It's our position on that and always have been that there should be a full and thorough investigation first before that deputy's name is blasted out there,” Mina said last week.
The Brady committee is expected to meet Monday, and the departments will be notified if one of their employees is on the list.
The list should be public next week.
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