Opinion ID: 2070680
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Request Was Overbroad in Regard to the Period Covered and the Type of Information Requested

Text: The core confrontation-clause reason for defendant's desire to obtain access to complainant's medical records was to ascertain if she had undergone any vaginal examination by a physician during (or immediately after) the period of the alleged sexual abuse by defendant and, if so, whether any such examination revealed any physical signs of the alleged sexual abuse. However, the request for the names and addresses of all physicians who examined or treated complainant for anything and everything over a four-and-a-half-year periodincluding any colds, flus, stomach aches, fevers, whooping cough, measles, or any of the other long litany of childhood afflictions unrelated to sexual abusewas grossly overbroad in regard both to the period covered (a period that included fourteen months after the alleged abuse stopped) and as to the types of medical treatments and examinations requested. Moreover, because the information sought by defendant about complainant was privileged and confidential health-care information, [8] the Superior Court would have been entirely justified in strictly limiting defendant to only that medical information concerning complainant that was needed for confrontation-clause purposes. Moreover, wholly apart from the privileged and confidential nature of the information sought, a hearing justice should not have to grant a defendant's informational demands for bushels of chaff if there is any possibility that such a request might turn up a few confrontation-clause kernels at the bottom of the discovery barrel. Nor should the hearing justice have to give defendant a blue pencil, take him by the hand, and then guide him through a redraft of such blunderbuss requests. Thus even if defendant's discovery request for the names of complainant's examining physicians had been ripe, even if it had been allowable discovery under Rule 16, even if it had been limited to a more appropriate period, and even if it had been presented to the trial justice instead of merely to a hearing justice a year before the trial, it should have been denied because of the manifest overbreadth in the medical information requested. [9] For all these reasons we conclude that the Superior Court did not err in refusing to grant defendant's pretrial motion to compel the state to produce as part of its pretrial discovery the names of all examining and treating physicians for one of the prosecution's witnesses.