Court Opinion

ID: 9786356
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 23:54:33.154799+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:36:44.617277
License: Public Domain

*176
Dissenting

memorandum.

The question here presented is not — contrary to the suggestion contained in the court’s memorandum — whether a witness is able to select his own time for his appearance before a grand jury. Obviously, the prosecuting authorities have some discretion in deciding when to call him, and our dissent has nothing to do with that proposition.
It is manifest, however, that a party may not be deemed “ a necessary and material witness for the people” before the grand jury (Code Crim. Pro., § 618-b), if the prosecutor does not intend to have him testify. In the case before us, the district attorney actually acknowledged that he neither planned nor plans to use relator as a witness or even to call him before the grand jury until after he shall have been tried for, and either convicted or acquitted of, crimes which he allegedly committed. Under such circumstances, to stamp relator as a “ necessary and material witness ’ ’ is not only at odds with the very meaning of the term but is inconsistent with a fair administration of justice. And, indeed, the impropriety, the irregularity, of what has been done is accentuated by the circumstance that the information filed against relator in the court of special sessions charges offenses intimately connected with the subject matter of the grand jury inquiry itself.
The relator may be, as the district attorney says, a very bad man, but Constitution and statute were made for all alike, and neither the character of relator nor the importance of the grand jury investigation can change the meaning of statutory language or impair constitutional safeguards.
In the view which we thus take of the matter, it is unnecessary for us to consider the claims of relator that the amount of bail fixed as to him ($250,000) is excessive and that his detention (since September, 1950) has already been for an unreasonable time. (N. Y. Const., art I, § 5.)
The order should be reversed and the writ of habeas corpus sustained.
Lewis, Conway, Dye and Froessel, JJ., concur in prevailing memorandum; Loughran, Ch. J., Desmond and Fuld, JJ., dissent in memorandum.
Order affirmed.