Court Opinion

ID: 9704426
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 00:34:59.596501+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:02.406271
License: Public Domain

M. J. Kelly, J.
(dissenting). The remand order quoted by the majority ordered the trial judge to affirm if he found the authorities were diligent in their pursuit of defendant. What authorities? House of Correction authorities, Recorder’s Court clerks and personnel, probation officers, Detroit police officers, magistrates, judges, computer operators?
They were all incredibly sloppy, careless and negligent. The trial judge found that:
" * * * [T]he Police Identification Department has been fouled up for at least the last 10 years and gets more snarled up each year, as the testimony indicates.
"The police department did not do its job.
"The probation department starts a separate file on each case. So Mr. Diamond, alias Eckford, has been through the system several times in Recorder’s Court. Each time he has a separate file with a separate number.
"Each time he entered the County Jail he had a separate card. I think there were — testimony indicated he had been in the Wayne County Jail nine times. But there is no cross check between prior cards unless there is some reason to look for it.”
When he was identified under both names at *517sentencing on April 2, 1971, a month and a half before the warrant in question was issued out of the same Recorder’s Court, both names were noted on the written order of conviction: "However, when the mittimus was typed upstairs by a clerk, the typewritten copy had the name Jeffrey D. Eckford only.” He was then sent to the Detroit House of Correction who had had him before as "Diamond” in 1969 • but the House of Correction either did not put the two together, or if they did, failed to notify anyone else.
He was back in the same court in June of 1972 for violation of the narcotics act. He was released on bond, failed to appear for trial and in August of ’72 a capias was issued for him. "[B]ut it never got in the file until June 14, 1973, apparently, 10 months later, the clerk finally put the thing in the file.” Four days before the capias was issued he was arrested on Chicago Boulevard in a housebreaking: "The police department was not able to make a case and never brought him to trial.” In March of 1974 he was arrested for shoplifting and somehow his two identities were put together whereupon this probation hearing was held and he was finally sentenced.
Such colossal, bungling ineptitude should be exposed and the bureaucrats who tolerate it identified.
I would reverse.