Opinion ID: 2190926
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: issues pertaining to defendant's convictions

Text: Szabo's sole assignment of error with respect to the trial concerns the denial of disclosure of summaries of oral statements made before trial by Leatherman to an assistant State's Attorney. Rule 412(a) provides that the State shall disclose to defense counsel, upon written motion, the following material within its possession or control: (i) the names and last known addresses of persons whom the State intends to call as witnesses, together with their relevant written or recorded statements, memoranda containing substantially verbatim reports of their oral statements, and a list of memoranda reporting or summarizing their oral statements. Upon written motion of defense counsel memoranda reporting or summarizing oral statements shall be examined by the court in camera and if found to be substantially verbatim reports of oral statements shall be disclosed to defense counsel. 73 Ill.2d R. 412(a)(i). Leatherman gave two written statements, which were provided to defense counsel. One was a statement made to Will County Investigator Lynn Jencon on February 3, 1979, the date Leatherman and Szabo were arrested, and recorded by Investigator Jencon. The other was a statement made to a polygraph operator on March 16 and 21, 1979. In addition, however, the record shows that between February and July 1979 an assistant State's Attorney conducted some 20 interviews, totaling approximately 30 hours, with Robert Leatherman. The prosecutor made rough notes of his conversations with Leatherman, but destroyed them after preparing an eight-page outline of Leatherman's expected testimony at trial. When defense counsel on the day of trial orally moved for disclosure of any memoranda summarizing Leatherman's oral statements in these interviews, the State's Attorney took the position that the rough notes were work product and that the State was therefore not obligated to produce them. He offered, however, to provide defense counsel with a copy of the eight-page trial plan, or, if the circuit court so ordered, to attempt to reconstruct the notes. The circuit court, finding that further discovery was not necessary, denied defendant's motion. We note in passing that although defense counsel's motion for disclosure was made orally and not in writing as required by the Rule, the State does not argue that the issue has therefore been waived. Since the issue was presented to the circuit court in a written motion for a new trial, and in view of this court's responsibility to scrutinize the record in capital cases with especial care, we should examine the alleged error as one affecting substantial rights of the defendant, to determine whether justice has been denied. See People v. Jones (1982), 94 Ill.2d 275, 294-95; People v. Carlson (1980), 79 Ill.2d 564, 576-77; People v. Brownell (1980), 79 Ill.2d 508, 542. The State argues here, as before the circuit court, that it was not obligated to produce the assistant State's Attorney's notes of his pretrial interviews with Leatherman, because the notes are privileged work product. Indeed, Rule 412 and our cases recognize an exception to disclosure for material privileged by the work-product rule. (73 Ill.2d R. 412(j)(i); People v. Bassett (1974), 56 Ill.2d 285, 292.) The import of the rule, however, is that the determination whether memoranda summarizing a witness' oral statements consist of or contain privileged material is to be made by the court, not the prosecutor. The committee comments to Rule 412 state: Paragraph (a), subparagraph (i), requires the additional production of any substantially verbatim report of an oral statement by a witness. The State is also obliged to produce a list of all memoranda reporting or summarizing oral statements whether or not the memorandum appears to the State to be substantially verbatim reports of such statements. The defense is then entitled, upon filing of a written motion, to have the court examine the memoranda listed by the State. If the court finds that the memoranda do contain substantially verbatim reports of witness statements, the memoranda will be disclosed to defense counsel. This additional requirement serves two purposes. First, it ensures that the final responsibility for determining what is producible rests with the court. Second, it establishes as a matter of record, the contents of the State's file with respect to reports of witness statements and thereby facilitates appellate review of contested questions of discovery under this subsection. (Emphasis added.) Ill. Ann. Stat., ch. 110A, par. 412, Committee Comments, at 679-80 (Smith-Hurd 1976). In People v. Bassett (1974), 56 Ill.2d 285, 289-92, this court summarized the law with respect to the disclosure required of the State in criminal cases. Bassett approved the approach taken in the previous decisions of People v. Sumner (1969), 43 Ill.2d 228, and People v. Wolff (1960), 19 Ill.2d 318. These decisions make clear that, once the defendant has made a specific demand for a report of a statement, and has made a preliminary showing, by way of foundation, of the statement's pertinence to the witness' trial testimony, the court is to order the statement to be delivered directly to the defendant for his inspection and possible use in impeachment. The court is not to consider whether the prior statements would in fact be useful for impeachment; only the defense should be permitted to make that determination. ( Jencks v. United States (1957), 353 U.S. 657, 667-69, 1 L.Ed.2d 1103, 1111-13, 77 S.Ct. 1007, 1012-14.) When the State resists disclosure, asserting that the statement or a portion thereof is irrelevant, or contains privileged material, or is not substantially verbatim, the court must examine the statement in camera and determine whether it is or is not properly producible; if necessary excise irrelevant or privileged matter; and turn over to the defendant whatever portion of the statement can fairly be said to be the witness' own words. Clearly, therefore, Szabo was entitled to have the assistant State's Attorney's notes of his interviews with Leatherman produced for in camera inspection by the circuit court, and to the disclosure of any unprivileged, substantially verbatim statements they contained for possible use in impeaching Leatherman's testimony. The assistant's action in destroying the notes deprived him of that right. Szabo contends that the circuit court's ruling denying further discovery deprived him of the opportunity to effectively cross-examine Leatherman. He asserts that he was thereby denied the right of confrontation guaranteed by the sixth amendment, and denied a fair trial. We first address the State's contention that, since it provided defense counsel with a copy of the eight-page trial plan, no further disclosure was required. The State suggests that this case is analogous to People v. Bassett , in which the prosecution's rough notes of interviews with witnesses were destroyed following the preparation of a number of white cards, intended for use by the State at trial. We do not think the situation in this case can be compared with that in Bassett. In Bassett, the court concluded that Rule 412 required disclosure of the white cards; the reason, however, was that they apparently contained the substance of the witnesses' pretrial statements, and were thus an adequate substitute for the original notes. (56 Ill.2d 285, 290, 292.) Here, in contrast, the eight-page, nonverbatim outline of Leatherman's expected trial testimony clearly is not the same as contemporaneous memoranda of some 30 hours of interviews with the State's star witness. In reviewing Szabo's claim of error, we find ourselves in a rather perplexing position. Since the interview notes, which Szabo asserts should have been disclosed, no longer exist, we cannot tell what they contained. If the notes had been preserved and were found to contain discoverable matter which could have been used to impeach Leatherman, we would then have to decide whether the denial of the opportunity to use the impeaching material in cross-examining Leatherman was prejudicial error. The improper limitation of cross-examination can, in some cases, amount to constitutional error. People v. Wilkerson (1981), 87 Ill.2d 151; Smith v. Illinois (1968), 390 U.S. 129, 19 L.Ed.2d 956, 88 S.Ct. 748. However, the notes were destroyed; their contents are unknown, and the effect of their nondisclosure would therefore seem impossible to assess. We do know, however, that Leatherman's testimony was central to the State's case against Szabo. Leatherman, an alleged accomplice, was also the only occurrence witness. Although strong circumstantial evidence was introduced that linked Szabo with Leatherman and with the crimes, Leatherman's testimony concerning Szabo's leading role in planning and carrying out the crimes was the only evidence tending to establish that Szabo premeditated the murders of John and Chris Rajca, and was therefore essential in proving that Szabo possessed the mental state necessary for a conviction of intentional murder. Effective cross-examination of Leatherman was thus crucial to Szabo's defense. Depending on the contents of Leatherman's pretrial statements, it is quite conceivable that their use in cross-examination would have produced a different picture of Szabo's culpability. The State's argument that the defendant's testimony at the sentencing hearing can somehow be used retrospectively in determining whether the defendant possessed the requisite mental state necessary for his conviction at the trial for the murder of John Rajca is misplaced. While it is true that Szabo ultimately confessed to the murder of John Rajca at the sentencing hearing, the defendant made no such incriminating statement during the course of his trial. Szabo did not take the stand during the trial. At the sentencing hearing Szabo testified that it was Leatherman who stabbed Chris Rajca to death. The testimony of Leatherman paints an entirely different picture in portraying Szabo as the murderer of both Chris and John Rajca. The appellate court has faced the same difficulty that confronts us here in several pertinent decisions in which a defendant claimed he was denied a fair trial by the State's failure to comply with the disclosure requirements of Rule 412, due to its intentional failure to preserve pretrial statements of witnesses. ( People v. Abbott (1977), 55 Ill. App.3d 21; People v. DeStefano (1975), 30 Ill. App.3d 935; People v. Manley (1974), 19 Ill. App.3d 365.) These cases involved the deliberate failure of the State to reduce a witness' statement to writing, as opposed to the intentional destruction of a statement after it has been written down, but we think the same principles apply to both situations. The thrust of the appellate court's holdings is that, while the discovery rules do not require the State to reduce all its witnesses' statements to writing, when the failure to preserve a statement to written form amounts to an intentional tactic to prevent disclosure of relevant material to the defendant, it will not be condoned. ( People v. Abbott (1977), 55 Ill. App.3d 21, 25; People v. Manley (1974), 19 Ill. App.3d 365, 370.) We agree with this view. In People v. DeStefano (1975), 30 Ill. App.3d 935, the key prosecution witness, an alleged accomplice who was granted immunity in return for his testimony, was interviewed at least five times before the trial by representatives of the State. At a post-trial hearing, the State's Attorney admitted that he had ordered that no memoranda or memorialization of any of the witness' statements were to be made. The appellate court reversed defendant's murder conviction, finding that the State's deliberate failure to take written statements was for the purpose of defeating defendant's right of discovery and the use of such discovery to test the witness' credibility at trial, and under the circumstances denied defendant due process of law. 30 Ill. App.3d 935, 943. People v. Manley involved a contempt proceeding against a State's Attorney for refusal to comply with an order that certain oral, pretrial statements of witnesses in a felony case be reduced to writing and made available for discovery by the defendant. The record made clear that it was a practice of the State's Attorney's office not to reduce substantially verbatim reports of oral statements to memoranda in order to surprise the defense at trial. In approving the circuit court's discovery order insofar as it required the reduction to writing of a specific statement  a witness' account of an admission by the defendant, which the State had indicated it intended to use at trial  the appellate court said: In our view, neither the defense nor the prosecution should be allowed to avoid discovery rules by a studied practice of failing to reduce otherwise discoverable information to writing. When the trial court determines within its discretion that the reason for the failure to reduce such a statement to writing is to avoid discovery, it may properly order that the statement be reduced to writing. However, in absence of the known presence of discoverable statements, neither the State nor the defense should bear the unreasonable burden of reducing all of its investigative information to writing. The application of the discovery rules as a whole and the solutions available, including the preclusion of evidence wrongfully withheld, will sufficiently insure a fair trial. People v. Manley (1974), 19 Ill. App.3d 365, 370. In the case at bar it is undisputed that potentially discoverable memoranda of pretrial statements by the State's key witness did exist and were deliberately destroyed by the State. We are unable, on the record before us, to determine whether defendant was prejudiced by the nondisclosure of the interview notes. It may be that they contained summaries of pretrial statements by Leatherman that were entirely consistent with his trial testimony and of no value for impeachment. Or it may be that they consisted mainly of the assistant State's Attorney's mental impressions and opinions, which would be privileged from disclosure. Or it may be that they contained prior statements flatly contradicting Leatherman's trial testimony on one or more points, or possibly revealing an unsuspected motive for Leatherman's testifying as he did, or giving such varying accounts as would have greatly discredited his testimony. We simply cannot tell what opportunities for cross-examination, if any, were denied Szabo by the nondisclosure of the notes. Consequently, we cannot say either that the nondisclosure resulted in prejudicial error, or that any error that occurred was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. As the determination depends upon the contents of the destroyed notes, we believe the appropriate course is to vacate the convictions and remand the cause to the circuit court for entry of an order directing the State to reconstruct the written memoranda of Leatherman's pretrial statements, and to deliver them to the court for an in camera inspection. In the event the court finds the notes to contain discoverable, substantially verbatim statements, it should deliver them to defense counsel and order a new trial. In the event the reconstructed notes are found not to contain substantially verbatim reports of Leatherman's pretrial statements, the circuit court is directed to reinstate defendant's convictions, subject to our discussion below of defendant's superfluous murder convictions. Szabo was charged by the indictment with four counts of murder  one count of intentional murder and one count of felony murder with respect to the killing of each victim. At the conclusion of the trial, the circuit court found him guilty on all four counts and entered judgment on all four. Szabo contends that since there were only two killings, he could be convicted of only two murders, under the rule that convictions for more than one offense cannot be carved from the same physical act. ( People v. King (1977), 66 Ill.2d 551, 566; People v. Donaldson (1982), 91 Ill.2d 164, 170.) The State concedes, and we agree, that entry of judgment on all four convictions was erroneous. Therefore, should the circuit court reinstate defendant's convictions after remand, only two convictions for murder should be reinstated.