Opinion ID: 1450284
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: (12) In future cases a trial court should have the discretion to permit a defendant, who lacks funds to investigate prospective jurors, to inspect prosecution jury records and investigations.

Text: On December 12, 1978, several weeks before trial, defense counsel moved in the alternative for discovery of prosecutorial investigations of prospective jurors or for $1,000 to enable the defense to conduct a similar investigation. Defendant renewed the motion on December 29, just before the start of jury selection. The district attorney at that time acknowledged that his office had conducted field investigations of prospective jurors and maintained records showing how the jurors had voted in prior cases and whether they had arrest records. The trial court, however, denied defendant's motion. As defendant recognizes, all California decisions and a majority of decisions from other jurisdictions have held that a trial court did not err in denying a defendant access to prosecution jury records. (See People v. Brawley (1969) 1 Cal.3d 277, 293-294[82 [82 Cal. Rptr. 161, 461 P.2d 361] and cases there cited; People v. Castro (1979) 99 Cal. App.3d 191, 198-199 [160 Cal. Rptr. 156]; People v. Airheart (1968) 262 Cal. App.2d 673, 679-681 [68 Cal. Rptr. 857]; People v. Darmiento (1966) 243 Cal. App.2d 358 [52 Cal. Rptr. 428]; People v. Superior Court (1959) 175 Cal. App.2d 830 [1 Cal. Rptr. 55, 78 A.L.R.2d 306]; People v. Ruef (1910) 14 Cal. App. 576, 596 [114 P. 48, 54]; see generally Annot. (1978) 86 A.L.R.3d 571.) The cases rest on two propositions: (1) it is uncertain whether the defendant would derive any significant advantage from discovery of jury investigations and records; (2) much of the information the defendant seeks could be learned by voir dire of the individual jurors. [26] Neither proposition supports the denial of discovery. It may be doubtful whether public funds should be spent on investigations which yield no clear and certain benefit, especially if the same information could be discovered in voir dire, but those doubts cannot justify making the results of the investigation available to one side but not to the other. [27] Whatever doubts the courts may have, it is apparent that the prosecutor here believes the advantage he gains from jury investigations and records justifies the expense. When courts then deny defendants who cannot afford similar investigations access to the prosecutor's records, the result is that prosecutors in case after case will have substantially more information concerning prospective jurors than do defense counsel. [28] Such a pattern of inequality reflects on the fairness of the criminal process. We therefore hold, under our authority to supervise the administration of California criminal procedure (see Hovey v. Superior Court (1980) 28 Cal.3d 1, 80 [168 Cal. Rptr. 128, 616 P.2d 1301] and cases there cited), that following the finality of this opinion a trial judge will have discretionary authority to permit defense access to jury records and reports of investigations available to the prosecution. (13) The foregoing holding does not require us to reverse the conviction in the present case. As the prior cases have pointed out, in any individual case it is entirely speculative whether denial of access caused any significant harm to the defense. Consequently, under the test of prejudice established in the California Constitution (art. VI, § 13) and People v. Watson, supra, 46 Cal.2d 818, 836, the denial of access is not reversible error.
The prosecution recalled Dr. Ronald Siegel, a psychopharmacologist, to testify in the penalty trial. He stated over objection that defendant in a prison setting will continue to be a violent assaultive and combative individual, and in constraints, with restraints on his behavior, and in a custodial care situation such as in a prison or in a jail, because of his inability to relate inter-personally, because of his latent rage and hostility and violence, I believe that this will be manifested in repeated displays. I think these displays, in my opinion, will be physical rather than verbal simply because his history, his past history and my clinical studies of him have indicated, his past history is one of physical rather than verbal displays. And that he may become not only assaultive and violent, but he could show the same types of homicidal tendencies that he has shown in the past, with no ability to morally or physically constrain himself to the demands of the environment in which he finds himself. We believe that the trial court should not have permitted this testimony. We shall explain that (1) expert predictions that persons will commit future acts of violence are unreliable, and frequently erroneous; (2) forecasts of future violence have little relevance to any of the factors which the jury must consider in determining whether to impose the death penalty; (3) such forecasts, despite their unreliability and doubtful relevance, may be extremely prejudicial to the defendant. The admission of this testimony, in our opinion, constitutes error requiring reversal of the verdict at the penalty trial. [29] Numerous studies have demonstrated the inaccuracy of attempts to forecast future violent behavior. [30] Two commentators summarized the results as follows: Whatever may be said for the reliability and validity of psychiatric judgments in general, there is literally no evidence that psychiatrists reliably and accurately can predict dangerous behavior. To the contrary, such predictions are wrong more often than they are right. (Ennis & Litwack, Psychiatry and the Presumption of Expertise: Flipping Coins in the Courtroom (1974) 62 Cal.L.Rev. 693, 737.) [31] Professor Dershowitz in 1969 pointed to the skewed results characteristic of psychiatric forecasts: it seems that psychiatrists are particularly prone to one type of error  over-prediction.... [F]or every correct psychiatric prediction of violence, there are numerous erroneous predictions. (Dershowitz, The Psychiatrist's Power in Civil Commitment: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways (Feb. 1969) Psych. Today, at p. 47.) Cocozza and Steadman in 1976 reviewed the various studies and reported that Whether one examines the legal, behavioral science or psychiatric literature on predictions of dangerousness, one constantly encounters conclusions similar to the one reached by Dershowitz that psychiatrists are generally inaccurate predictors. (Cocozza & Steadman, op. cit., supra, 29 Rutgers L.Rev. at p. 1085.) In 1978 Professor Monahan undertook a further review of studies of violence prediction and noted that the percentage of false positives (erroneous predictions that a subject would engage in violent behavior) never fell below 54 percentage and went as high as 99.7 percent. (Monahan, The Prediction and Control of Violent Behavior (1978) pp. 179-196, in Hearings Before the House Subcom. on Domestic and International Scientific Planning, 95th Cong. 2d Sess., pp. 175-252.) We took judicial notice of studies showing the unreliability of attempts to forecast violence in People v. Burnick, supra, 14 Cal.3d 306. [32] We there observed that: During the past several years further empirical studies have transformed the earlier trend of opinion into an impressive unanimity: `The evidence, as well as the consensus of opinion by responsible scientific authorities, is not unequivocal.' (Diamond, The Psychiatric Prediction of Dangerousness (1975) 123 U.Pa. L.Rev. 439, 451.) In the words of spokesmen for the psychiatric profession itself, `Unfortunately, this is the state of the art. Neither psychiatrists nor anyone else have reliably demonstrated an ability to predict future violence or dangerousness. Neither has any special psychiatric expertise in this area been established.' (Task Force Report, Clinical Aspects of the Violent Individual (American Psychiatric Assn., 1974) p. 28.) And the same studies which proved the inaccuracy of psychiatric predictions have demonstrated beyond dispute the no less disturbing manner in which such prophecies consistently err: they predict acts of violence which will not in fact take place (`false positives'), thus branding as `dangerous' many persons who are in reality totally harmless. (See generally id. at pp. 23-30.) (P. 327.) In Burnick, we cited the uncertain character of psychological prediction to support our conclusion that a person should not be committed as a mentally disordered sex offender unless found to be such beyond a reasonable doubt. The issue in Tarasoff v. Regents of University of California (1976) 17 Cal.3d 425 [131 Cal. Rptr. 14, 551 P.2d 334, 83 A.L.R.3d 1166], was different  whether a psychotherapist who predicted that a patient would kill an identifiable victim owed a duty to exercise reasonable care to avert that danger. Rejecting the contention that a therapist should not act on the basis of predictions of such demonstrated unreliability, we held that when a therapist predicts or should predict a danger of violence, he incurs an obligation to use reasonable care to protect the intended victim. We explained in Tarasoff that imposition of such a duty of care was not inconsistent with our decision in Burnick. In contrast to Burnick the issue in Tarasoff, we said, was not whether the patient should be incarcerated, but whether the therapist should take any steps at all to protect the threatened victim; some of the alternatives open to the therapist, such as warning the victim, will not result in the drastic consequences of depriving the patient of his liberty. Weighing the uncertain and conjectural character of the alleged damage done the patient by such a warning against the peril to the victim's life, we conclude that professional inaccuracy in predicting violence cannot negate the therapist's duty to protect the threatened victim. (17 Cal.3d at p. 439.) Thus in Tarasoff we balanced the uncertain and conjectural harm to the patient against the mortal risk to the potential victim, and concluded that the therapist should act on the basis of his prediction, unreliable though it may be. That same balancing process in the present context yields a far different result. There is nothing speculative about the harm to defendant, who faces not merely a risk of short-term incarceration but of execution. What is uncertain and conjectural is whether defendant, if imprisoned for life, will at some uncertain future date assault some yet unidentified victim. The calculus of risk which called for acting despite uncertainty in the Tarasoff setting does not justify executing a defendant to avoid improbable and speculative danger. The Attorney General points out that, despite our doubts concerning psychological predictions of future violence, we have never barred the expert witness from testifying to his opinion on that subject. It would be consistent with past cases, he suggests, to hold that difficulties in prediction go to the weight of the evidence rather than to its admissibility. [33] We reject this suggestion, for two reasons. First, as we recognized earlier, the penalty of death is qualitatively different from a sentence of imprisonment, however, long.... Because of that qualitative difference, there is a corresponding difference in the need for reliability in the determination that death is the appropriate punishment in a specific case. ( Woodson v. North Carolina (1976) 428 U.S. 280, 305 [49 L.Ed.2d 944, 961, 96 S.Ct. 2978] (plur. opn. of JJ. Stewart, Powell, and Stevens.) Consequently, [a]lthough the utilization of predictive testimony by mental health experts in death penalty hearings does not differ in many ways from reliance upon it in other contexts, the unique severity of the penalty increases the importance of avoiding unjustified reliance upon predictions of `dangerousness.' (Dix, The Death Penalty, Dangerousness, Psychiatric Testimony, and Professional Ethics (1977) 5 Am. J. Crim. L. 151, 212.) In short, evidence which is barely reliable enough to justify a civil judgment or a limited commitment is not reliable enough to utilize in determining whether a man should be executed. [34] Second, in most of the other cases in which courts have upheld admission of opinion testimony forecasting future violence, such as People v. Henderson (1980) 107 Cal. App.3d 475, 484 [166 Cal. Rptr. 20] the trier of fact is required by statute to determine whether a person is dangerous. (See, e.g., Pen. Code, § 1026.2 (restoration to sanity); Welf. & Inst. Code, §§ 5276, 5300 (Lanterman-Petris-Short Act); Welf. & Inst. Code, § 6300 (mentally disordered sex offender hearings).) In such cases expert prediction, unreliable though it may be, is often the only evidence available to assist the trier of fact. The penalty jury in a murder trial, however, is not required to determine whether the defendant is dangerous or likely to commit future violence; in fact, as we shall explain, such a determination is at best only marginally relevant to the task at hand. Expert forecasts of future violent acts, as we have said, have little relevance to the determination of penalty. The Legislature has listed specifically the factors which the jury must consider in deciding whether to impose the death penalty. [35] The testimony of Dr. Siegel is not relevant to any of the listed factors. [36] Former section 190.3, however, permitted the parties to introduce evidence as to any matter relevant to aggravation, mitigation, and sentence, including, but not limited to, the nature and circumstances of the present offense, the presence or absence of other criminal activity by the defendant which involved the use or attempted use of force or violence or which involved the expressed or implied threat to use force or violence, and the defendant's character, background, history, mental condition and physical condition. The admission of evidence is not limited to matters relevant to the specified aggravating or mitigating factors. [37] Arguably the risk that defendant will commit future violent acts is a matter relevant to aggravation which reflects on defendant's future character and mental condition. In view of the unreliability of that forecast, however, the probative value of that testimony is far outweighed by its prejudicial impact. [38] One can imagine few matters more prejudicial at the penalty trial than testimony from an established and credentialed expert that defendant, if sentenced to life without possibility of parole, would be likely to kill again. Such testimony implants in the mind of each juror the message that the death penalty, promptly carried into effect, is the only way to protect society from the defendant  the only way to forestall another instance in which defendant responds to frustration with deadly violence. A trier of fact offered the opportunity to base a decision on the affirmative assertion by an apparently well-qualified professional that a defendant's execution is essential to saving the lives of others is likely to take that opportunity rather than face the difficult task of evaluating the offender's ethical culpability.... [Such predictions tend] to discourage the sort of individualization that the Supreme Court has demanded of death penalty procedures. (Dix, Participation by Mental Health Professionals in Capital Murders Sentencing (1978) 1 Internat. J. of L. & Psych. 283, 397.) We acknowledge that despite the recognized general unreliability of psychiatric predictions concerning future violence, it may be possible for a party in a particular case to show that a reliable prediction is possible. A more reliable forecast, for example, might be possible if the psychiatrist had established a close, long-term relationship with defendant that gives him a greater understanding of defendant's behavior than can usually be attained in brief, often adversary, pretrial interviews. A reliable prediction might also be conceivable if the defendant had exhibited a long-continued pattern of criminal violence such that any knowledgeable psychiatrist would anticipate future violence. Thus, we do not adopt an absolute rule barring such predictions at the penalty phase of a capital trial. [39] In the present case, however, Siegel examined defendant on only one occasion  an examination devoted largely to determining whether defendant acted under the influence of PCP or other drugs  and had no established and close relationship with defendant on which to base his prediction. Defendant's asserted past violent acts were few and relatively trivial. Under these circumstances we have no reason to believe that Siegel's prediction was immune from the general unreliability which attends predictions of future violence generally. In sum, Siegel's prediction that defendant would be violent in a prison setting is unreliable. In fact, judging by the studies cited, that prediction is probably wrong; in other words, despite Siegel's forecast, it is statistically more probable that defendant will not commit such violent acts. The prediction is not directly relevant to any of the factors which the jury was required to consider in fixing the penalty under former section 190.3, and, although arguably admissible under that statute, the prejudicial impact of that testimony far outweighs its probative value. We conclude that the trial court should not have permitted Siegel to testify over objection as to his opinion respecting defendant's future behavior. [40] The erroneous admission of Siegel's testimony, is prejudicial error under any standard of review. Siegel's prediction that defendant would be violent and homicidal in prison was the principal prosecution penalty phase evidence. The jury deliberated two full days before deciding on the death penalty, suggesting that the issue of penalty was close. Under these circumstances, even if we applied the most liberal test of prejudicial error  whether it is reasonably probable that a more favorable result would have been reached absent the error (see People v. Watson, supra, 46 Cal.2d 818, 836)  we would conclude that the admission of Siegel's testimony was reversible error. The judgment is reversed insofar as it relates to penalty. In all other respects the judgment is affirmed.