Opinion ID: 2581358
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Pitchess Motion

Text: Officer Phillip Johnson testified at the penalty phase to an incident on January 14, 1992, when, after defendant refused to leave a cordoned crime scene, the officer arrested him for resisting a police officer's order. Before Officer Johnson testified, defendant brought a motion to discover the existence of citizen complaints made against the officer for misconduct, including dishonesty, false arrest, or fabrication of charges or of evidence. At a hearing in chambers, the trial court examined the officer's personnel records, found only one relevant incident out of a total of four, and released to the defense the name, address, and telephone number of the complainant. Defendant contends that he should have been given more information, both about the three complaints that the court declined to disclose and about the circumstances involving the fourth complainant. Additionally, he complains that a fifth complaint was not disclosed. He maintains the court's failure to disclose more information from the officer's personnel file denied him due process. Named after Pitchess v. Superior Court (1974) 11 Cal.3d 531, 113 Cal.Rptr. 897, 522 P.2d 305, and now codified in Evidence Code sections 1043-1045, a motion to discover information from a police officer's personnel file permits disclosure of confidential information only under specified conditions. (See City of Los Angeles v. Superior Court, supra, 29 Cal.4th at pp. 19-20, 124 Cal.Rptr.2d 202, 52 P.3d 129.) Defendant here makes no showing that he was entitled to additional information from Officer Johnson's personnel file. Regardless of whether the trial court abused its discretion, any Pitchess error relating to Officer Johnson was harmless either under the test for state law error of whether there is reasonable possibility that the error affected the penalty verdict ( People v. Ashmus (1991) 54 Cal.3d 932, 990, 2 Cal. Rptr.2d 112, 820 P.2d 214) or under the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt test ( Chapman v. California, supra, 386 U.S. at p. 24, 87 S.Ct. 824) applicable to denial of discovery that implicates the federal constitutional guarantee of due process ( Wardius v. Oregon (1973) 412 U.S. 470, 474-476, 93 S.Ct. 2208, 37 L.Ed.2d 82). Officer Johnson testified to one of four unadjudicated crimes offered by the prosecution. Here defendant made a profane comment, implicitly threatening physical violence to Officer Johnson. Even had the officer been impeached as an unbelievable witness, his testimony was redundant to the three other violent incidents offered by the prosecution as aggravating factors under section 190.3, factor (b).