Opinion ID: 364924
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: An Evidentiary Hearing

Text: 20 Morgan's final argument can be reduced to the contention that because he may have denied making the statements mentioned in the police report summaries, the burden of proving them reliable should shift to the prosecutor, and a sentencing judge should not be allowed to consider such allegations unless that burden is met in an evidentiary hearing. But there is a host of cases, beginning at least with Williams v. New York, supra, and running through United States v. Grayson, supra, and United States v. Miller,supra, which allows consideration of all kinds of information not limited to that which meets the standards of the Rules of Evidence. Implicit in all of those cases is the assumption that the sentencing judge has broad discretion to decide for himself not only the relevance but also the reliability of the sentencing information. Otherwise, a defendant's denial of the correctness of information would always lead to an evidentiary hearing prior to sentencing and a delay in the administration of the criminal justice system, a result which the Supreme Court in Williams v. New York, Supra, sought to guard against. 337 U.S. at 250, 69 S.Ct. at 1084. 21 As noted earlier, we wish to encourage probation officers to secure as much information as possible in order to assist the courts in formulating proper sentences. For these reasons, we hold that unless there exists problems of the type criticized in Townsend, Tucker and Weston, supra, the defendant should bear the burden of presenting evidence concerning a questioned item in the presentence report. Judge Thompson offered Morgan an opportunity to do so, but he declined to take advantage of it.