Court Opinion

ID: 9541954
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:30:04.766107+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:05:27.011692
License: Public Domain

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE UNDERWOOD, dissenting: As I understand the majority opinion, it requires production of certain white cards containing summaries of rough notes of pretrial conversations had by investigating personnel with prosecution witnesses despite the fact that these summaries cannot be said to be either verbatim or substantially verbatim statements of those witnesses. In my judgment this new construction which the majority places upon our criminal discovery procedure and its retroactive application to a case tried years earlier are unwarranted, without support in our earlier decisions and directly contrary to our present Rule 412. Ever sinee People v. Wolff, 19 Ill.2d 318, in which this court said at page 323: “All authorities examined agree that use of documents produced under the rule is restricted to impeachment, thus it is held that only statements or reports which could properly be called in the witness’s own words should be made available to the defense”, this court has adhered to a rule which gave defendants access to statements of prosecution witnesses only where the State intended to call such persons as witnesses at the trial and the documents were verbatim or substantially verbatim statements of the witness. Resolution of questions whether a given document was in the witness’s own words or substantially so was entrusted to the judge. And it is precisely this rule which was adopted by this court in Rule 412 and announced as a part of our criminal discovery rules which became effective October 1, 1971. The policy decisions involved in determining the scope of that rule had been thoroughly debated by the Committee on Discovery and Procedure Before Trial in Criminal Cases appointed by this court. The court was thoroughly conversant with the arguments in favor of expanding the rule to include memoranda summarizing the oral statements of witnesses, and the arguments for restricting production to verbatim or substantially verbatim statements of the witness. Rule 412 represented our considered judgment to retain the “verbatim or substantially verbatim” limitation, and the reasons which then persuaded me to vote for that limitation are equally, if not more, persuasive at the present time. It is even more surprising to me that a change of this magnitude occurs in the form of dicta, acknowledged by the majority in the statement that “the testimony of the witnesses interviewed was not required to prove the defendants guilty on the accountability theory.” The majority, in quoting from Wolff, has completely overlooked the fact that the entire opinion in that case was bottomed upon the premise, quoted above, that only verbatim or substantially verbatim statements were considered producible. Likewise, the majority’s citation of People v. Sumner, 43 Ill.2d 228, overlooks the fact that the F.B.I. reports of interviews there involved were established by the testimony of the Bureau agents to be substantially verbatim transcriptions of the conversations with the witnesses. It is, in my judgment, fundamentally unfair to a witness to permit his impeachment by prior statements not shown to be substantially in the witness’s own words. The United States Supreme Court in Palermo v. United States, 360 U.S. 343, 3 L. Ed. 2d 1287, 79 S. Ct. 1217, emphasized these reasons in discussing the policy motivating inclusion in the Jencks Act (18 U.S.C. sec. 3500) of the “substantially verbatim” requirement: “*** it was felt to be grossly unfair to allow the defense to use statements to impeach a witness which could not fairly be said to be the witness’ own rather than the product of the investigator’s selections, interpretations and interpolations.” (360 U.S. at 350.) “It was important that the statement could fairly be deemed to reflect fully and without distortion what had been said ***. Distortion can be a product of selectivity as well as the conscious or inadvertent infusion of the recorder’s opinions or impressions.” (360 U.S. at 352.) The Committee on Pretrial Proceedings of the American Bar Association Project on Standards for Criminal Justice in formulating section 2.1(a)(i) of its Standards Relating to Discovery and Procedure Before Trial apparently found these reasons persuasive, for it also limits production to “relevant written or recorded statements” of witnesses. Those reasons are particularly relevant here. The purpose in requiring production is to permit impeachment of a witness whose testimony at trial differs from his earlier statement, and the customary method of accomplishing that purpose is to lay a foundation by first inquiring of the witness whether he had, at the earlier time and place made the contradictory statement under the described circumstances. It would be difficult, confusing and in some instances impossible to lay that foundation unless the document provided the defense includes the witness’s earlier statement in verbatim or substantially verbatim terms. Likewise it is manifestly unfair to any witness to permit his impeachment on the basis of a summary of the witness’s statements prepared in the words of the author of the summary. And that unfairness is compounded here where the “white cards” now to be given defendant are in fact a summary of an original sheet of notes which were themselves only “rough notes.” If the majority’s reason for requiring production of the summaries is that the “yellow sheets” upon which the original “rough notes” were written have been destroyed by the State, it would, in my opinion, be far preferable to simply say so. As matters now stand, Rule 412 and our earlier decisions require statements to be verbatim or substantially so before their production may be ordered; the majority opinion appears to eliminate that requirement. The answers to questions which arise in almost every criminal case ought not to be left by this court in such a confusing state. The majority opinion also finds that defendant Stamps must be given a new trial for failure of the court to provide the jury with appropriate verdict forms. I cannot agree. The jury was provided with two verdict forms— guilty and not guilty. While it would have been desirable for the jury to have been given a special verdict form of not guilty by reason of insanity including a verdict form indicating whether the defendant had recovered, the failure to give it in this case is not reversible error. Section 115 — 4(j) of the Code of Criminal Procedure (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1965, ch. 38, par. 115—4(j)) in force at the time of the trial indicates that a special verdict form of not guilty by reason of insanity should be provided the jury where the affirmative defense of insanity has been presented at the trial. The defense tendered an instruction which included a verdict form indicating whether the defendant had or had not recovered from insanity but failed to tender an instruction in the proper form as contemplated by section 115 — 4(j) in that no special jury verdict form of “not guilty by reason of insanity” was offered. Defendant later objected to the State’s instructions for their failure to include such a form, but the defendant never tendered such an instruction himself. The defendant knew what the proper form was, but insisted on offering his own incomplete instruction and then later objected to the State’s instructions for failure to include a proper form but still made no offer of such a form himself. In these circumstances, it seems anomalous for the defendant to complain of the failure to give a special verdict form. In addition, defendant’s instructions No. 38 and No. 50, which were given, state respectively that if the State has not proved beyond all reasonable doubt that defendant was sane at the time of the commission of the acts, then defendant should be found not guilty; and that if defendant was not able to distinguish right from wrong and could not control his actions accordingly then he should be acquitted on the ground of insanity. The jury was then fully aware that defendant should not be convicted if he was insane, and was so instructed. Had the jury accepted defendant’s defense of insanity, it must be assumed they would have rendered a verdict of not guilty since they had been so instructed. Their return of a general verdict of guilt indicates a rejection of Stamps’ defense of insanity and renders unnecessary any determination whether defendant had or had not recovered from his alleged insanity. I would affirm the judgments, remanding only for resentencing of those defendants who received the death penalty.