Opinion ID: 1293219
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: Hitch Motion

Text: (19a) Defendant claims the trial court erroneously denied his motion to dismiss or, in the alternative, for sanctions under People v. Hitch (1974) 12 Cal.3d 641, 645-646 [117 Cal. Rptr. 9, 527 P.2d 361], based on the prosecution's failure to preserve and disclose the names of two potential defense witnesses. Shortly after Jones and Kreuger disappeared, and early in the police investigation of the case, Detective Grace, who was in charge of the missing persons investigation for the Anaheim Police Department, was notified by Mrs. Jones, the victim's mother, that she had received a phone call from a man who gave his name as George C. Beckett. According to Mrs. Jones, Beckett telephoned her from a pay phone (apparently in response to fliers issued by the victims' families in cooperation with the police) to say that he had seen one or both of the victims on August 24, 1982, at a truck stop in El Paso, Texas. Mrs. Jones notified Detective Grace of the phone call, and Grace noted the telephone number in the missing persons file. The record reveals that Grace called the number five times, but there was no answer. According to Detective Grace, a second caller, who identified herself as Sandy Maren, told Grace that she thought she saw one of the missing girls at a discotheque in Orange County. Maren told Grace that she frequented the disco every night and she agreed to call Grace if she saw the girl again. Grace did not ask Maren for her address. Although Grace filed the information in the missing persons file, he never heard from either Beckett or Maren again, and subsequent attempts by the police department and the defense to contact the witnesses failed. Defendant argues that locating both witnesses was crucial to his case because all that connected the victims to the case was their identification made with dental charts. Defendant theorizes that because the precise time and date of the deaths was unknown, it is conceivable that the girls were killed by someone else after they were seen alive by the above two witnesses and brought to the desert where they were buried. In this context, defendant speculates that these potential witnesses could have totally exonerated defendant by showing that the victims did not die at the time assigned by the prosecution and Hernandez. (20) In Hitch, we determined that the People's duty to preserve evidence applies whenever there exists a reasonable possibility that the evidence would have been material and favorable to defendant on the issue of guilt or innocence. (12 Cal.3d at p. 649). In California v. Trombetta (1984) 467 U.S. 479 [81 L.Ed.2d 413, 104 S.Ct. 2528], the United States Supreme Court addressed the People's affirmative duty to preserve evidence under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The high court imposed a standard different from Hitch : Whatever duty the Constitution imposes on the States to preserve evidence, that duty must be limited to evidence that might be expected to play a significant role in the suspect's defense. To meet this standard of constitutional materiality [citations], evidence must both possess an exculpatory value that was apparent before the evidence was destroyed, and be of such a nature that the defendant would be unable to obtain comparable evidence by other reasonably available means. ( Trombetta, supra, 467 U.S. at pp. 488-489 [81 L.Ed.2d at p. 422]; see In re Michael L. (1985) 39 Cal.3d 81 [216 Cal. Rptr. 140, 702 P.2d 222].) The Trombetta court also recognized that the same test applies to prosecutorial disclosure cases, noting that although a similar requirement of materiality exists in such cases, there is no constitutional requirement that the prosecution make a complete and detailed accounting to the defense of all police investigatory work on a case. (467 U.S. at p. 488, fn. 8 [81 L.Ed.2d at p. 422].) We recognized recently in People v. Johnson (1989) 47 Cal.3d 1194, 1234 [255 Cal. Rptr. 569, 767 P.2d 1047], that because the Hitch formulation of the duty-to-preserve test was premised on federal due process, the federal test set forth in Trombetta should prevail. We also held in Johnson that our adoption of the Trombetta rule is compelled by the Truth-in-Evidence provision of Proposition 8. ( Johnson, supra, 47 Cal.3d at p. 1234.) (19b) Under the Trombetta test, we cannot characterize as exculpatory or substantially material the telephone calls (one of which originated from a telephone booth) of two people claiming they may have seen the victims after the alleged murders. Moreover, as the People observe, the police here actually preserved the names and phone numbers of the two alleged witnesses. Defendant's true complaint is that the police failed to adequately investigate the callers' information and thus failed to obtain material evidence that would exculpate defendant. Because we find that the authorities acted reasonably in preserving the names of the witnesses, we believe the court properly denied defendant's Hitch motion. Moreover, this is not, as defendant claims, a case in which the court should impose sanctions for failure to obtain evidence, or destruction of evidence already obtained. ( People v. Zamora (1980) 28 Cal.3d 88 [167 Cal. Rptr. 573, 615 P.2d 1361] [sanction imposed to deter systematic destruction of police records].) As the People point out, the record reveals Grace pursued his investigation of the case with reasonable diligence, turning over the missing persons file to the defense investigator on request. We see no evidence of a failure on the part of the prosecution to preserve material evidence that would warrant either dismissal or the imposition of sanctions in this case. (See Zamora, supra, 28 Cal.3d 88, 99.)