Court Opinion

ID: 9734162
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 17:26:42.45377+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:46.073604
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE WARD, also concurring in part and dissenting in part: The only claim of error that Szabo makes regarding his trial and the question of his guilt concerns the circuit judge’s denial at the bench trial of the defendant’s oral motion that the People produce notes that the People asserted were the prosecutor’s work product. The majority reversed the judgment of murder and directs that in the event the court finds in an in camera inspection that the reconstructed notes of the prosecutor contain discoverable, substantially verbatim statements of Leatherman it shall deliver them to the defense and order a new trial to determine whether the defendant is guilty of the murder of John and Christopher Rajca. If the notes, as reconstructed, are substantially verbatim statements of Leatherman, and if they conform to Leatherman’s testimony, conducting a new trial — especially as to the murder of John — will be inexplicable. The defendant testified at the hearing that he had shot John Rajca, and he obviously “possessed the mental state necessary for a conviction of intentional murder,” a point which unnecessarily, I consider, concerns the majority. The defendant testified in part: “Q. He [Leatherman] handed the weapon to you? A. [Defendant] Pardon? Q. He handed the gun to you? A. Yes, sir. Q. And what did you do at that time? A. I leaned over to my left in the back seat, pointed the gun towards John and fired. Q. You leaned over from the right behind the passenger’s side and you shot John? A. Yes, sir. * * * Q. Now, you picked on John, right; you shot John? A. Yes. Q. Why did you shoot him? A. I don’t know. Q. How did you feel at the time? A. I didn’t know what to feel. Like I felt — all I could say, I felt bad. Q. You felt bad. What happened when John got shot? A. He started gagging. Q. What did you do? A. That’s when — right when he started gagging, he reached — he reached down and clicked the door trying— Q. What happened then? What happened then? A. That’s when he just fell over. Q. He just fell over? A. He just fell over. Q. What did you do? A. I pushed the door open the rest of the way, got out. Grabbed a hold of him and dragged him up by the fence.” The defendant’s testimony was, of course, a judicial confession to the murder of John Rajca. (See 2 H. Underhill, Criminal Evidence sec. 385 (5th ed. 1956).) Chief Justice Ryan correctly observes that holding a new trial will be a useless waste of judicial resources. RYAN, C.J., and UNDERWOOD, J., join in this partial concurrence and partial dissent.