Court Opinion

ID: 9698198
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 19:44:26.851797+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:39.227175
License: Public Domain

*283Thim, J.
(concurring).
I concur in the result and with much of the reasoning employed by my colleagues. Nevertheless, I feel that too much emphasis is placed upon the absence of the defendant in this case from the grand jury proceedings. The heavy reliance on such a test strongly implies that, in cases where an accused is present during grand jury proceedings, the indictment would furnish prima facie evidence of likelihood of conviction and relieve the state from its burden of going forward with the evidence at the bail hearing.
The result in the instant case ought not to rest on whether the defendant is permitted to attend the proceedings and thereby to acquire knowledge of the state’s case. Rather, the result reached should be dictated by a holding that an indictment in this state cannot amount to prima facie evidence of likelihood of conviction, irrespective of attendance by the accused at the grand jury proceedings. This is so for two reasons. First, the grand jury is instructed not to concern itself with guilt or innocence; its sole function is to determine whether there should be a trial. Consequently, a true bill could he returned even in a case where a majority of the grand jury felt there was little chance of conviction if sufficient jurors concluded that the evidence still warranted a trial, since the grand jury is instructed to ignore the question of guilt. Second, even if the accused is present during the proceedings, he is denied counsel and forbidden to introduce any evidence of his own. Thus, the indictment procedure in Connecticut, even when the accused is present, does not provide adequate safeguards and opportunity for him to exculpate himself so as fairly to produce a finding of likelihood of conviction. The conclusion is inescapable that an indictment cannot properly he ac*284corded any significance above that dne the very-limited determination that there should be a trial. It therefore would be of little evidentiary value in a bail hearing at which the quite separate question of likelihood of conviction must be decided. After all, provision for such a hearing admits, of necessity, that even though an accused is indicted he is not necessarily likely to be convicted. For these reasons this court should hold unequivocally that an indictment can never be prima facie evidence of likelihood of conviction and that the state should always bear both the burden of proof and of going forward with the evidence at the bail hearing.
An incidental benefit of such a holding would be to place the state in control of the scope of the bail hearing. Since it would have both burdens, it could choose how much of its case to put on at the hearing (with the risk, of course, that it might fail to sustain its burden on the issue of bail), and the accused would be limited to a rebuttal of what the state chose to introduce.