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State v. Diprete5/1/1998
§ 8-6-2 that a Superior Court rule, such as Rule 16, once approved by this Court "shall supersede any statutory regulation in conflict therewith." In Letendre v. Rhode Island Hospital Trust Co., 74 R.I. 276, 281, 60 A.2d 471, 474 (1948), this Court held that a rule of court adopted pursuant to § 8-6-2 must be "given the same force and effect as a statute." Accordingly Rule 16 provides whatever statutory authority the majority believed was lacking to support the trial Justice's supervisory authority in this case.
I therefore conclude that there is no recognized precedential support for my colleagues new "no authority" or "lack of authority" appellate rule that has been introduced and employed in this appeal. Unlike my colleagues I do not believe that a Superior Court trial Justice is just a "passive bystander in the arena of Justice," or "a spectator at a 'sporting event'" but rather that "he or she has the most pressing affirmative responsibility" and authority to ensure that Justice is done in every case, according to the Superior Court Rules of Criminal Procedure and constitutional due process guarantees. United States v. McCord, 509 F.2d 334, 347 (D.C. Cir. 1974). See also Brennan, The Criminal Prosecution; Sporting Event or Quest for Truth?, 1963 Wash.U.L.Q. 279. As Justice Frankfurter said in Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 46, 54, 68 S.Ct. 391, 395, 92 L.Ed. 468, 475 (1948), " udges are not referees at prize-fights but functionaries of Justice." In that regard the trial Justice in this case to whom the case had been specially assigned for trial possessed the inherent authority to supervise and regulate the pretrial discovery proceedings undertaken by the parties in the case pursuant to Rule 16. In addition and correlative to that inherent authority, I believe the trial Justice possessed supervisory power to vindicate that authority by appropriate sanction imposed pursuant to Rule 16(i). The majority at first blush appears to acknowledge that inherent authority and supervisory power but then proceeds to whittle away that acknowledgment by the introduction of its "no-authority" and "federal directive" rules, suggesting that both serve to restrict a trial Justice's supervisory authority and power.
Because I find no recognized precedential authority to support the majority's "no authority" or "lack of authority" appellate scope of review in this appeal, it appears to me then to have been fashioned apparently only for this particular appeal. Accordingly, I persist in my belief that the only appellate issue properly before us in this appeal remains as it has always been, namely, whether the state has proven a clear abuse of discretion on the part of the trial Justice in this case in his selection of case dismissal as the only proper sanction considered by him to be adequate to remedy the prosecution's flagrant prosecutorial pretrial discovery misconduct and the state's repeated violation of his court discovery orders.
Although the state in its appeal has claimed that the trial Justice abused his discretion, not even my colleagues in the majority believe that to be so, because if they did, they would have said so in their opinion. At no point in their opinion do they find that the trial justice abused his discretion. How then do I reconcile their reversal of the trial Justice's discretionary Rule 16(i) case dismissal sanction order when reviewed in light of the trial Justice's findings of fact? I cannot, and I venture to suggest that neither can they. I believe it was for that very reason that they abandoned what has always been the only proper scope of our appellate review in appeals challenging a trial Justice's imposition of a Rule 16(i) discovery violation sanction and elected 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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