UPDATED: Judge rules Mineral County sheriff Brady cop allegations are 'a nothingburger'

SUPERIOR — After three years of litigation, a judge has ruled that 10-year-old allegations of inconsistent reports by current Mineral County Sheriff Ryan Funke don’t constitute Brady material and don’t need to be provided to defendants in criminal cases.

The Mineral County Attorney’s Office, representing the Mineral County commissioners, has argued that inconsistencies in Funke’s reports when he served as a deputy in Lake County constituted Brady material, meaning the office would have to provide this material to the defense in cases where Funke’s testimony or reports were used. Judge Shane Vannatta ruled from the bench on Wednesday in favor of Funke and his attorney Paul Leisher, who argued that these inconsistencies were standard minor mistakes.

“I think it’s a nothingburger,” Vannatta said, borrowing the verbiage of Mineral County Attorney-elect Roy Miller, who took the stand during Wednesday’s evidentiary hearing.

The allegations against Funke were that he’d failed to Mirandize some suspects and then reported he had done so in some reports, and that he’d made a false statement about an attempt to stop a suspect vehicle in an application for a search warrant.

“I don’t think it results in something that makes Sheriff Funke unreliable or not credible,” Vannatta said in his decision.

The decision came at the end of a nine-hour evidentiary hearing in Mineral County’s district courthouse in Superior on Wednesday. Usually, hearings over Brady material take place behind closed doors as part of an existing criminal case, Miller testified. A prosecutor presents material to a judge, who decides whether it would make a witness seem less credible and whether the defense can use it in their case.

The hearing was unusual for not being part of any current criminal proceeding. It was also unusual for being partially open to the public, Leisher explained after the hearing.

The evidentiary hearing was initially sealed, because some of the evidence involved confidential criminal justice information and officers have a right to privacy surrounding unproven allegations. But after a request from the Missoulian, Vannatta opened the hearing, but closed the courtroom for testimony that contained private information for six of the nine hours.

Vannatta ordered the parties in the case to appropriately redact the evidence that was submitted during the hearing, which will then be released following a five-day grace period, Vannatta said.

Case history

According to decisions from two past Supreme Court cases, Brady v. Maryland and Giglio v. United States, if a prosecutor knows information about any witness the defense could use to undermine their credibility, the prosecutor must give that information to the defense. This means if an officer commits misconduct that could make a jury doubt their account of a case, any case they're involved in as a witness or writer of reports now comes with an obligation to the prosecutor's office to disclose that information to the defense.

This information is sometimes called Brady material or Giglio material. Law enforcement officers who have Brady material in their career that prosecutors must disclose are sometimes referred to colloquially as Brady cops, though law enforcement and judges alike don’t care for the term.

The case started in 2023 when Funke filed a lawsuit against the Mineral County commissioners, alleging they were interfering with his hiring discretion with a specific candidate.

Mineral County had reason to be wary about police officers with Brady material at the time — the county had just gone through a grueling legal proceeding, where Vannatta found that the county had been negligent in its Brady obligations and ordered it to fulfill those obligations.

The commissioners alleged the person Funke wanted to hire had misconduct allegations against him, which allowed them to interfere.

Over three years of litigation, the focus shifted to Funke himself, and whether he committed misconduct while serving as a Lake County deputy. (Vannatta ruled that the deputy this was all about to begin with doesn’t have Brady material in his past employment with Mineral County.)

At the previous hearing in this matter in April, the case was argued by current Mineral County Attorney Debra Jackson. But for the Wednesday hearing, Mineral County was represented by a special prosecutor, Adam Duerk, a Missoula attorney and member of the American Board of Trial Advocates.

Funke is currently up for reelection. Funke, who was elected three years ago, is running against Ben Banks, a former Mineral County sheriff deputy and currently a major crimes agent with the Montana Department of Justice. Both are running as Republicans, so whoever wins the June 2 primary will take office on Jan. 1, 2027.

Vannatta stated on Wednesday that he was ruling from the bench despite the late hour because people may be waiting on the outcome of the hearing to decide who they’re voting for.

About 70 members of the public attended the hearing via Zoom, with another dozen in the courtroom at the beginning. After the six-hour sealed portion, about 40 people came back to the Zoom meeting.

At the beginning of the hearing, Leisher commented that this level of scrutiny is highly unusual for a Brady hearing, calling it a “public media circus.”

The facts at issue in this case go back farther than the 2023 filing.

In 2015, Funke was a deputy with the Lake County Sheriff’s Department.

There are two incidents at issue here: a Ninepipes Lodge theft case and what was referred to as "the laser pointing incident." Most of the evidence detailing these incidents is currently sealed, but they both involved a shared defendant. This defendant allegedly harassed Funke and then later was a suspect in the Ninepipes Lodge case, according to court proceedings.

According to allegations by the Mineral County Attorney’s Office, a Lake County investigation found that Funke had reported reading the Miranda rights to suspects in these cases when he in fact had not.

There was also a search warrant application in one of these cases that stated Funke tried to pin a suspect’s driver’s side door during a high-speed chase. Prosecutor Duerk alleged that video evidence, which is not currently publicly available, didn’t show this attempt.

Arguments and testimony

Duerk argued that the inconsistencies in the report could constitute Brady material, which prosecutors would be obligated to disclose.

In his opening arguments, Leisher argued that the county’s evidence would, if anything, be relevant in a suppression of evidence hearing, but wasn’t material to a defendant’s trial rights.

“The focus of Brady is, did this person get a fair trial?” Leisher said.

The county’s first witness was Ben Anciaux, who has worked for Lake County since 2015 and worked on both the Ninepipes Lodge theft case and the laser pointing incident.

Anciaux said his work relies heavily on law enforcement reports and witnesses. Although on paper law enforcement are just like any other witness, in practice that’s not how a jury sees it, Anciaux said.

“An officer is believed more than just a natural witness,” Anciaux said.

Anciaux said that any inconsistency in an officer’s record can raise concerns about the strength of a case. That affects his charges at trial or getting a plea agreement.

Anciaux also commented on the importance of accuracy in search warrant applications, because a judge is making their decision on whether to grant the warrant purely based on the information in that application.

“They are almost entirely relying on what the person drafting the affidavit has to say,” Anciaux said.

At that point, the hearing was closed for the remainder of Anciaux’s testimony, with Duerk citing confidential information as the reason. Leisher stated after the hearing that four more witnesses were questioned behind closed doors.

The courtroom was opened at 4 p.m. for the testimony of Robert Long, who served as the defense attorney for one of the defendants in the 2015 cases. Leisher called him to the stand to answer an important question: did Funke’s inconsistent reports raise any flags for him as a defense attorney?

They didn’t, Long said. He hadn’t even filed any motions to suppress any of the evidence collected.

Roy Miller, who in the absence of any other candidates will be taking the office of Mineral County attorney at the start of next year, took the stand next.

Miller said he’d seen some inconsistencies in the report from the 2015 laser pointer incident, such as syntax errors, misspellings and an inconsistency as to whether Funke properly Mirandized the suspect. For the Ninepipes Lodge incident, Miller said he’d noticed inconsistencies with Miranda warnings and thought Funke shouldn’t have been on the case in the first place, given his personal stake in it.

“There was no Miranda advisement that I could hear during the encounter in the hotel room,” Miller said.

Miller also commented on the search warrant inconsistency, saying the video was ambiguous as to what Funke had tried to do, so couldn’t be taken as proof of unreliability.

“In isolation, that fact is a nothingburger,” Miller said.

Miller has previously practiced law in California, and said he’s dealt with thousands of Brady cases, much of it as a defense attorney. Based on that experience, he doesn’t think Funke’s material adds up to that.

“Juries tend to be common-sense driven. They tend to take a broad view,” Miller said. “What I see here does not add up to something I’m going to be spending time with juries on.”

Miller said that Miranda violations are almost never Brady material. He said that Brady material with officers is stuff like law enforcement who dealt drugs or who had impersonated officers before becoming officers themselves. Miller stated that repeated violations of Miranda rules trigger sanctions or internal investigations, not Brady proceedings.

“I know that he wants to do good,” Miller said of Funke. “The lack of resources in this county is shocking, and law enforcement is having to make do with very little.”

But Miller also said that Jackson did the right thing bringing this material before the court.

Funke became emotional after Vannatta pronounced his decision, and declined to comment except through his attorney.

“We essentially had to conduct the Lake County investigation 10 years later in this courtroom,” Leisher said after the hearing. “It wasn’t fair when it happened 10 years ago.”