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State v. Diprete5/1/1998
e prosecution's violation of its pretrial discovery obligations so prejudiced the defendants that any conviction following would be inherently infected by that prejudice and predestined for reversal. Any trial thereafter would be nothing but a costly, time-consuming judicial charade at the expense of the taxpayers and would serve only to heap additional prejudice upon the defendants. The majority responds to the trial Justice's Conclusion that the defendants could never receive a fair trial that could satisfy constitutional standards by claiming that his dismissal interfered "with the public interest in having the guilty brought to book." That noble pronouncement overlooks first the fact that these defendants are still presumed by law to be innocent and, secondly, the majority's statement appears to be strangely reminiscent of the chant heard from spectators in the ancient Roman Coliseum just before the lions were let loose.
Certainly not to be overlooked here is the undeniable fact that the defendants in this case are entitled, by both our State and our Federal Constitutions, not only to a fair trial on the charges made against them but also to a speedy trial. Their right to a speedy trial is constitutionally guaranteed because all reasonable judicial authority clearly recognizes that human memories are apt to dim, vary, and/or change with time and can thus adversely impact upon a defendant's right to a fair trial. Certainly no trial can ever be a search for the truth if the trial is delayed to the point where the trial witnesses are unable to accurately recall what the truth is. In that same vein we should not overlook the fact that the defendants here are facing charges some of which date back thirteen years to 1985, and the state, in order to sustain those charges, must rely in great part upon the recollections of its four key witnesses. Defense counsel, recognizing that their clients' rights of confrontation connote something more than simply their right to face those four witnesses, diligently attempted for more than a two-year period of precious pretrial preparation time to learn from the state through pretrial discovery whether those four witnesses had any criminal conduct in their backgrounds and whether the state had made any deals with them in return for their cooperation and testimony. That requested and later court-ordered information was certainly necessary, if not crucial, for defense counsel to have prior to trial in order to permit them not only to plan trial strategy but also, and perhaps more importantly, to enable defense counsel to adequately prepare for their cross-examination of those four state's witnesses at trial.
This Court has long recognized that a defendant's right encompassed within the confrontation clause, while fundamentally a trial right and not a constitutionally compelled rule of pretrial discovery, nonetheless should not restrict a defendant's ability to adequately prepare for the cross-examination of the state's trial witnesses. In re Douglas L., 625 A.2d 1357, 1360 (R.I. 1993)(citing Douglas v. Alabama, 380 U.S. 415, 418, 85 S.Ct. 1074, 1076, 13 L.Ed.2d 934, 937 (1965)). Indeed two of the majority Justices have recently recognized that very fact in their dissent in State v. Brown, No. 95-648-C.A., slip op. at 34 (R.I., filed March 13, 1998), in noting that "the confrontation clause is fundamentally a trial right and should not be confused with a 'constitutionally compelled rule of pretrial discovery.' * * * Yet the principle will compel a state to produce material when the failure to do so would improperly restrict the types of questions defense counsel may ask during cross-examination. State v. Kelly, 554 A.2d 632, 635 (R.I. 1989)." (Emphasis added.) See also
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