Court Opinion

ID: 9569474
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:14:06.90414+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:59:36.710527
License: Public Domain

ZIMMERMAN, Justice
(concurring):
I join the majority in its analysis of the speedy trial issue. However, the majority opinion is entirely silent regarding the dispute that delayed this case so long, a dispute that resulted from the Salt Lake County Attorney’s taking a curiously inconsistent position. Because the action of the County Attorney has implications for other cases in which the speedy trial question may arise, it deserves comment.
Immediately after Mr. Ossana's arrest, the County Attorney refused to return to Ossana a large amount of cash seized during the search of the Ossana residence. The County Attorney asserted that the cash was evidence of a transaction with a confidential informant that occurred some time before the arrest. When Ossana’s attorney sought particulars regarding the alleged transaction with the supposed informant, the County Attorney refused to divulge the information, despite the fact that Ossana was clearly entitled to it. The prolonged wrangling that followed, described in this Court’s opinion in Cannon v. Keller, 692 P.2d 740 (Utah 1984), prevented speedy resolution of the criminal charges.
Following the Cannon decision — in which the County Attorney’s position was flatly rejected as being entirely without merit — the case was remanded for further proceedings. After additional delay, and prompted by two orders from the district court, the County Attorney ultimately returned the funds to Ossana. It appears to me now, as it did at the time Cannon was decided, that the County Attorney came dangerously close to acting in bad faith when he claimed that the funds were evidence of some other transaction and yet refused to give any information of that transaction to the defendant and to adequately justify that refusal. In fact, given the ultimate resolution of the matter following the Cannon remand, the County Attorney’s conduct suggests that his position was taken principally to harass Ossana by denying him the use of his money pending the prosecution of the case.
If bad faith on the part of the State were demonstrated in a given case, I would charge the resulting delay against the State, ignore any complicity in the delay on the defendant’s part, and then determine the speedy trial issue. Were the delay as long as it was here, I would find a denial of the defendant’s rights. The prosecutor is entrusted with a tremendous amount of discretion in deciding whom to prosecute and how the prosecution is to be conducted. This imposes upon the prosecutor a corresponding duty to exercise this power with the utmost good faith. When it is not, the courts should not hesitate calling the State to account. As stated in State v. Brickey, 714 P.2d 644, 647 (Utah 1986), “[T]he prosecutor’s good faith is a fragile protection for the accused.”
The present case, however, is not one that calls for charging the State with the delay occasioned by the fight over the funds and the consequent need for discovery. The County Attorney’s position, although quite questionable, was accepted by a district judge. See Cannon v. Keller, 692 P.2d at 742. That appears to preclude a finding of bad faith, since the district judge had the relevant facts before him. Under such circumstances, the defendant’s active complicity in the delay requires that the delay not be charged entirely against the State.
DURHAM, J., concurs in the concurring opinion of ZIMMERMAN, J.