Court Opinion

ID: 9589180
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:41:55.728547+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:31:00.103444
License: Public Domain

*712Judge Phillips
concurring in the result.
While I agree that defendant’s trial was free of prejudicial error I do not agree with much that is said in the majority opinion about the subpoena duces tecum and the court’s justification for quashing it. The subpoena was properly obtained, in my opinion, as counsel had good reason to suppose that the records involved — of two juvenile delinquents — might contain information detrimental to their credibility as witnesses, which was the controlling issue in the case; and rhetorical but largely meaningless cliches such as “fishing expeditions” and legislatively created privileges must yield to a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Thus the court had a duty to examine the subpoenaed records and to determine whether they contained anything of material benefit to defendant in the trial of the case; and if they had, due process, as well as the statutory provisions that created the privileges involved, would have required the court to make such information available to defendant, even though the relevant and helpful information in the records was vastly exceeded by information that was neither relevant nor helpful. But, as the trial court correctly found, the records subpoenaed contained nothing that the defendant could have properly utilized in defending the charge brought against him.