Court Opinion

ID: 9539843
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:10:56.978876+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:59:23.964425
License: Public Domain

STROUD, Judge,
concurring.
Although I concur fully in the holdings of the majority opinion, I write separately to note that this opinion should not be construed as approval of the State’s failure to produce certain evidence in response to defendant’s discovery request and the court’s discovery order.
As the majority opinion notes, the State did not provide the crime scene diagram (State’s exhibit 3) and the photographs depicting the scene where the weapon was recovered (State’s exhibits 24, 25, and 26) to defendant prior to trial, despite defendant’s timely motion for discovery and the court’s 16 November 2007 order requiring discovery. At trial, after defendant’s objection to the State’s presentation of *715these exhibits, the judge asked the assistant district attorney (“ADA”), “[w]hy were they not produced to the defense earlier and why were they not produced as of Monday when they were received by you [from Detective Booth]?” The ADA responded,
I guess in my experience, Judge, photographs like this are not something that we generally give to [sic] in discovery. ... I didn’t give him or hand over any — the gun or the earrings or the bracelets. Those kind of things. Photographs are the [sic] similar types of items. I gave him the other photographs because I happened to have them on a disk to do so and he doesn’t have those. So I provided those to him.
Essentially, counsel’s argument likened the photographs to the murder weapon and indicated that the Wake County District Attorney’s Office (“we”) generally did not provide this “kind of thing” to defense counsel, despite a discovery order.
Defendant argues before this court that
[i]t seems . . . absurd (especially in a First Degree Murder case) for presumably experienced prosecutors to tell the trial court that it just wasn’t the custom of the Wake County District Attorney’s Office to comply with the dictates of the general statutes and court orders when it came to tangible exhibits.
I agree. The State prevails in this case only for the reasons stated in the majority opinion. I write separately to stress that the State provided no valid reason to withhold discovery of the crime scene diagram and photographs and to clarify any misunderstanding which the State may have regarding types of photographs or diagrams to produce in response to a discovery order. The differences between a murder weapon or other physical evidence recovered from a murder victim and a copy of a photograph are too obvious to belabor. The State is obligated to produce the photographs or other evidence as requested and ordered in the discovery order — no more, no less.