Thursday, December 17, 2020 On October 21, 2020, President Trump signed into law the “Due Process Protections Act” (“DPPA”), P.L. No. 116-182, 134 Stat. Ann. 894, which was effective upon enactment. Receiving rare bi-partisan support in both houses of Congress, the new law seeks to bring balance to the power dynamic between the prosecution and the defense by requiring federal courts at the outset of a case to put the government on notice of its constitutional discovery obligations and the potential consequences for flouting those obligations. By directly amending Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 5, rather than waiting for the usual process of the Judicial Conference of the United States recommending a proposed amendment to Congress, this new law suggests a sense of urgency among elected officials to curtail prosecutorial misconduct and overreach by federal prosecutors. In a statement issued after the bill was signed into law, Senator Sullivan, of Alaska, cited the infamous 2008 case against the late U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (who was then the longest-serving Republican U.S. Senator in history). In that case, the U.S. Department of Justice took the virtually unprecedented step of voluntarily moving to dismiss the indictment against Senator Stevens—after he was found guilty by a federal jury—when it was discovered that federal prosecutors improperly withheld exculpatory