Opinion ID: 1181051
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Prosecutor's Compliance With Discovery

Text: Before trial, the prosecution was ordered to disclose to defendant (i) all statements and utterances by defendant, oral or written, however recorded and preserved, whether or not signed or acknowledged by the defendant and (ii) the `sign-in or identification lists' of the New Jersey County Jails indicating the names and times of those individuals who visited or interviewed MALCOLM ROBBINS during November and December [1980] ... and January of [1981]. As noted above, defendant met the prosecution's case-in-chief (including the California and Texas confessions) by presenting evidence that he tended to confess falsely in order to please the police. In fact, the heart of his defense was the falsity of the Texas confession. In rebuttal, the prosecution presented three law enforcement officials  from Maine, New York, and Wisconsin  who had questioned defendant during his incarceration in New Jersey about sex crimes involving young boys. In these sessions, defendant had denied involvement in any of the cases and apparently was no longer a suspect in some of them. [8] The officer from Wisconsin testified defendant said that he would say whatever he could say about any case, but that he wasn't going to take the rap for something he hadn't done. The defense objected to the officer's testimony on the ground counsel had not received discovery of any of the three interviews. Counsel argued he had formulated his defense strategy on the assumption that defendant had made numerous false confessions, that he sought discovery to determine if there was anything inconsistent with this pattern of false confessions, and that incomplete discovery had led him to believe that there was not. Defendant therefore sought to exclude the proffered testimony. The prosecutor responded that the requested lists did not exist; that the interviews in which defendant refused to confess were not statements and were beyond the scope of the first part of the discovery order; that he had not become aware of these interviews until after the defense evidence was presented; and that the defense had been, and must have been, aware of these interviews before trial. Finally, the prosecutor asserted he had believed that the defense had wanted a list that would show the dates and times at which defendant was interviewed  and that such a time sheet could not have been reconstructed from the material available to him. The court found no bad faith on the prosecutor's part in complying with the discovery order, and refused to exclude the rebuttal evidence. The court granted a 24-hour continuance and ordered the prosecutor to provide defendant with the witnesses' original police reports. (7) Defendant now asserts the prosecutor failed to comply with the discovery order and that the rebuttal testimony should have been excluded, or, at least, he should have been granted more than a 24-hour continuance. The People contend there was no failure to comply, because the order could not validly require the prosecutor to provide items of which he was unaware or that were in the possession of other jurisdictions. Assuming the trial court erred in concluding the prosecution adequately complied with the discovery order, reversal is not warranted here. First, the usual remedy for noncompliance with a discovery order is not suppression of evidence, but a continuance. ( People v. Reyes (1974) 12 Cal.3d 486, 502 [116 Cal. Rptr. 217, 526 P.2d 225].) Second, assuming the 24-hour continuance was inadequate to dispel any prejudice resulting from the prosecution's conduct, any error was harmless. Contrary to defense counsel's representations that he might have prepared a different defense had he been aware of behavior inconsistent with the assumed pattern of false confessions, we strongly doubt he would have done so. Once the confession to the present crime and the confession to the Dallas crime were ruled admissible, the defense had very little choice about what strategy to pursue. An effort to show that defendant tends to confess falsely  based on the alibi evidence for the Dallas offense  must have been his best hope. The alibi evidence, if successful, would have drawn the sting from the Dallas offense as other crimes evidence. Most significantly, the evidence of defendant's guilt was very strong. He confessed in detail to the charged crime. Though the defense presented psychiatric evidence that he might have made some false statements in that confession, he did admit killing the boy, and counsel explicitly conceded the killing in his argument. Moreover, although counsel contested the sexual aspects of the encounter with Christopher, the testimony of his own expert witnesses undermined this position more effectively than any rebuttal evidence. Each expert offered pedophilia as a diagnosis of defendant's psychological state. Each witness thought it at least likely that defendant had a sexual motive in picking up Christopher. We conclude the evidence that Christopher's killing occurred in the course of a section 288 violation was extremely strong, and that it is not reasonably likely the rebuttal testimony cost defendant a more favorable result. ( Watson, supra, 56 Cal.2d at p. 836.)