Court Opinion

ID: 9692159
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 15:44:56.579894+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:32.211163
License: Public Domain

SUMMERS, Justice
(dissenting).
The Court’s ruling today opens wide the door to pretrial discovery in criminal cases. This result must follow for we shall find it impossible to rationally distinguish this fac*746tual situation from the numberless fact situations future cases will present.
In effect this case changes the concept of the underlying premise of the criminal process in Louisiana. I have always believed, and this Court has always proceeded upon the basic assumption, that a criminal trial is an adversary proceeding in which the law grants many advantages to the accused, not least among which is the mandate that the law is served by doing justice, not by whether the government wins or loses. In this principle reposes the concept of fairness which has distinguished the American system of justice. Underlying today’s decision, however, is the mistaken and erroneous premise that the criminal process is an unequal contest between the State and its immense investigatory resources and an often poor and uneducated defendant.
The error of the latter view is made clear by the words of Judge Learned Hand in United States v. Garsson, 291 F. 646, 649 (S.D., N.Y.1923) when he said:
Under our criminal procedure the accused has every advantage. While the prosecution is held rigidly to the charge, he need not disclose the barest outlines of his defense. He is immune from question or comment on his silence; he cannot be convicted when there is the least fair doubt in the minds of any one of the twelve. Why in addition he should, in advance have the whole evidence against him to pick over at his leisure, and make his defense, fairly or foully, I have never been able to see. . . . Our dangers do not lie in too little tenderness to the accused. Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream. What we need to fear is the archaic formalism and the watery sentiment that obstructs, delays and defeats the prosecution of crime.
Though uttered fifty years ago the timeliness and wisdom of Judge Hand’s words will not escape even the casual observer of our times.
Today’s decision strikes down a policy to which this Court has adhered for many years. See State v. Hunter, 250 La. 295, 195 So.2d 273 (1967). A policy we repeatedly declared we would not change, but would leave to the legislature to alter if change were forthcoming.
At a time when hope endures in a Nation troubled and disrupted by crime and violence that the law will come forth with a remedy for these ills, this Court ventures into a program of innovation which can only impair the punishment of criminals, proliferate the ancillary proceedings attending criminal trials and overburden the already severely taxed machinery of criminal justice.
I respectfully dissent.