Court Opinion

ID: 9651486
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:20:11.395644+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:34.263360
License: Public Domain

Pashman, J.
(concurring and dissenting). I am in substantial accord with the thorough and comprehensive opinion of the Chief Justice. I am obliged to differ on only two points.
First, I join in the views expressed by Judge Conford in his concurrence as to the rights of the public to be informed of the proposed promulgation of rules concerning prison discipline by the Department of Institutions and Agencies and to engage in public debate over their wisdom and propriety.
Second, I reject the view of the majority that standards of due process and administrative fairness are satisfied by providing the prisoner accused of disciplinary infractions the opportunity to confront and cross-examine his accusers only “in such instances where the Adjustment Committee deems it necessary for an adequate presentation of the evidence.” Ante at 530. Confrontation and cross-examination are the fundamental mechanisms for ascertaining truth in our adversary system. Professor Wigmore has aptly observed :
IPor two centuries past, the policy of the Anglo-American system of evidence has been to regard the necessity of testing by cross-examination as a vital feature of the law. The belief that no safeguard for testing the value of human statements is comparable to that furnished by cross-examination, and the conviction that no statement (unless by special exception) should be used as testimony until it has been probed and sublimated by that test, has found increasing strength in lengthening experience.
*563[Cross-examination] is beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth. * * * If we omit political considerations of broader range, then cross-examination, not trial by jury, is the great and permanent contribution of the Anglo-American system of law to improved method of trial procedure.
[5 Wigmore, Evidence, § 1367 at 32 (Chadbourne ed. 1974) ; footnotes omitted].
To deny the accused prisoner the opportunity to cross-examine his accusers is to substantially gut his right to a hearing.
Only in the situation where there is a real and substantial danger of violent reprisal would I permit this right to be truncated, and then only upon a specific statement in the record of the factual basis for the belief by the prison authorities that such a danger exists.
Justice Marshall has thoroughly canvassed this issue in his dissent to Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U. S. 539, 583-90, 94 S. Ct. 2963, 2988-91, 41 L. Ed. 2d 935, 967-70 (1974). Since I have nothing to add to his analysis and I cannot express it as well as he, I adopt his words as my own and incorporate them herein by reference.