Court Opinion

ID: 9697511
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 19:18:41.102834+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:33.216860
License: Public Domain

SPAETH, Judge,
concurring and dissenting:
I concur in the majority’s disposition of these appeals, and join its opinion, except in one respect. I believe that as a result of the lower court’s denial of their request for samples of the alleged marijuana, appellants are entitled to a new trial. I therefore dissent from the majority’s decision to remand for expert examination of the alleged marijuana.
The majority says that “an independent expert examination may confirm that the substances are marijuana and also that the tests employed by the Commonwealth’s experts are unimpeachable. Appellants could hardly then claim that their trial defense was affected by the court’s erroneous ruling; in fact, such a result would place appellants in the exact posture as they found themselves during their trials.” At 246. I submit that this statement is beyond our competence.
At each trial defense counsel vigorously cross-examined the Commonwealth’s expert, trying to cast doubt on the expert’s qualifications and on the validity of the testing procedures employed. Without having had the opportunity to have his own expert test the alleged marijuana, counsel *130had to conduct the cross-examination more or less in the dark. For example, the reliability of the Commonwealth’s procedures might depend on particular qualities of the material tested, but without his own tests, counsel could not know whether the material had those qualities. As the Supreme Court of Alabama has put it:
To enable one to present his defense fully and effectively, the right of cross-examination, thorough and sifting, must remain inviolate, and to enable the defendant to invoke this right, on motion, he should be furnished a sample of the allegedly prohibited substance that will be offered against him in the trial so that he can have its qualities researched by scientists of his choosing. We think that to deny him this right is to deny him due process[.]
Warren v. State, 292 Ala. 71, 75, 288 So.2d 826, 830 (1973).
It may of course be true that if counsel had had his own tests, his expert would have confirmed that the material was indeed marijuana. But then counsel might have chosen a different strategy, placing less emphasis on cross-examination of the Commonwealth’s expert and more in another area. In any case, I don’t see how we as an appellate court are competent to say that we know that counsel’s strategy could not have been affected by the knowledge that independent tests had confirmed that the alleged marijuana was marijuana.
When the question now before us has been presented to other courts on appeal from a conviction,1 the result has almost without exception been the grant of a new trial. This was true in the case from which I have just quoted, Warren v. State, supra, as well as in the case quoted by the majority, at 246, Jackson v. State, 243 So.2d 396 (Miss.1970). Of all of the cases cited by the majority, slip op. at 5-6, in only one was the grant of a new trial conditioned on the outcome of independent tests. State v. Gaddis, 530 S.W.2d *13164 (Tenn.1975). I find no reason not to follow the majority rule.
I therefore dissent from that part of the majority’s order that conditions the grant of a new trial on the result of the independent tests.

. In two of the cases cited by the majority, at 246, the proceedings were still at a pre-trial stage, so the question of whether there should be a new trial was not presented. United States v. Acarino, 270 F.Supp. 526 (E.D.N.Y.1967); State v. Migliore, 261 La. 722, 260 So.2d 682 (1972).