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State v. Diprete5/1/1998
he disobedient party. Rather, discovery sanctions are designed to advance the goal of accuracy and fairness. Moreover, non-prejudicial dismissal is not as painless for the State as defendant implies. The State recognizes that these different types of dismissal having varying effects upon the case. In exercising the discretion described in Coelho, of course, a trial justice is free to consider the relative severity of prejudicial and non-prejudicial dismissal in choosing a discovery sanction. The mere fact that one sanction is more severe should not be a justification for obliterating the lesser sanction from the range of options available to the court."
The majority, it appears, also seeks to neutralize and defuse Quintal by distinguishing it from this case because of the self-executing conditional dismissal order present in Quintal. When Quintal and Rawlinson stand side by side, however, the distinction sought to be made by the majority then becomes a distinction without a difference. The validity and judicial integrity of any court order, once entered by the court, is in no way thereafter conditioned upon anything other than counsel's complete compliance with, and obedience to, the order. Whether counsel agrees with the order, tacitly or otherwise, becomes inconsequential. As correctly noted by defense counsel during oral argument before this Court, for this Court to afford a self-executing order of dismissal, such as the one in Quintal, preferential treatment to the order of dismissal found here in this case would actually serve to reward the state's prosecutors for their deceit and untruthfulness. I agree. A court order, even when prepared by the parties, once entered by the court, becomes the order of the court, not of the parties, and must be complied with and respected. "A court order, once issued, must be obeyed, or our system of Justice evolves into a system of inJustice." Brisson, 619 A.2d at 1103.
The majority additionally attempts to explain and justify its new "no authority" rule by extracting what it calls a directive from its three-page opinion review of various federal cases it candidly admits are all "distinguishable on their facts * * * from the case at bar." The apocryphal directive from those federal cases that the majority announces and introduces in this appeal is said to be "that a trial Justice's supervisory power cannot create new rules of exclusion or dismissal in the absence of a constitutional or statutory basis for such a ruling."
I am perplexed by the majority's reference to that purported federal directive because of its obvious lack of relevance to the appellate issue presently before us in this appeal. The trial Justice in this case has never created any new case dismissal rule, and in fact no one but the majority suggests that he did. The basic fallacy inherent in the majority's introduction of that purported federal directive into this case apparently stems from its belief that there is an absence of any statutory basis for the trial Justice's sanction dismissal order, and thus the asserted federal directive becomes applicable in this case. In that regard I submit that the majority either overlooks or ignores the existence of the unquestionable statutory authority that supports the trial Justice's dismissal order in this case and which is readily found in Rule 16(i) of our Superior Court Rules of Criminal Procedure. That rule, proposed by the Justices of the Superior Court in April 1972 and later approved by this Supreme Court, became effective on September 1, 1972. On that date Rule 16 assumed the same force and effect as any statute duly enacted by the General Assembly. The General Assembly not only said that in G.L. 1956 ยง 8-6-4 but also added in
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Rhode Island Personal Injury Attorneys
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