Court Opinion

ID: 9761228
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 01:35:05.647745+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:21.231981
License: Public Domain

CARTER, Justice,
with whom DUFRESNE, A.R.J., joins, concurring.
I join in the Court’s opinion and concur in the result there reached. I have, however, one concern on which I think it necessary to express myself separately from my colleagues.
That concern relates to a doctrinal disagreement I have about the scope of the rule announced in the Court’s opinion on the subject of the prior cross-examination of the State’s chief witness. (At 2A-25.) *27The rule applied by the Court’s opinion is that on retrial, after a mistrial, the defendant may object on grounds of competency or relevancy to transcribed testimony from the prior trial even though such objections were not lodged to the testimony at the prior trial, but that the defendant is precluded from asserting objections on the ground of unresponsiveness unless such objections were made at the prior trial.
I disagree with any restriction placed upon defendant’s ability to assert any legitimate objection at the second trial because of her failure to make such objection at the prior trial. Such a restriction is inconsistent with the defendant’s right to one, complete, fair trial and with the effect of the mistrial. I think it to be indisputable that in a criminal case such as this,
[t]he declaration of mistrial rendered nugatory all of the proceedings during the first trial. The State and defendant were returned to their original position as if there had not been a trial. Each was entitled to offer evidence and to make motions and objections without limitation to that which had been offered or made at the first trial and without being bound by the prior rulings of the Court with respect thereto.
State v. Hale, 127 N.J.Super. 407, 413, 317 A.2d 731, 734 (1974). (Emphasis added.)
After a mistrial was declared, this defendant was perfectly free to change or to modify her plea for purposes of the second trial, to plead anew any available defenses, to change the factual basis of the defense and, indeed, to change within the strictures of pleading the theory of the defense. A mistrial “means that the [prior] trial itself was a nullity.” 317 A.2d at 733. Given the broad flexibility allowed to the defendant in respect to these significant trial functions, I can see no rational justification for, nor any purpose to be accomplished by, attributing any preclusive effect to anything so mundane, by comparison to the breadth of those options, as the conduct of either counsel on examination or cross-examination of witnesses or the court’s prior rulings on evidentiary questions at the prior trial.
More importantly, such a preclusive effect results in defendant not receiving a single, comprehensive, fair trial. Rather, the adjudication of her guilt or innocence is based in part upon a trial that has been declared a nullity and in part upon the final proceeding as afflicted by those portions of the prior “non-trial” imported into it. Our concept of the adjudication of criminal guilt is so important and the ideal of fair trial so multifaceted that neither can exist undiminished, in my view, side-by-side with a permitted practice of “patchwork litigation.”