Patrick H. Dunn won in State v. Auman, No. 120,438 (Kan. App. November 1, 2019), affirming Judge Porkorny's dismissal of a Douglas County aggravated battery while DUI prosecution. The state did not provide dashcam video of the incident until the Friday before trial the next Monday. The video included evidence of previously undisclosed witnesses and other exculpatory evidence. The Monday trial date was the last date to try Mr. Auman under the statutory speedy trial limit. Just before trial, Mr. Auman moved to dismiss based on the late disclosure. Judge Porkorny agreed finding that the late disclosure impaired the defense opportunity to contact witnesses and that the statutory speedy trial limit was running. The COA held that Judge Porkorny did not abuse her discretion:
If the State had disclosed the video dashcam evidence earlier in the case, instead of the Friday before a Monday trial, Auman would have had an opportunity to contact the witnesses and investigate this available defense. But it was not reasonable—particularly given the time that had passed between the May 2016 collision and the October 2018 trial—to expect that the defense could contact these witnesses and investigate their accounts the weekend before the trial.
And while the prejudice caused by delayed disclosures of material discovery in some cases may be rectified through another discovery sanction (such as the exclusion of certain evidence) or continuing the trial, such remedies were not available here. The State's suggested remedy of excluding the dashcam video, which the State intended to offer so the jury could hear Auman's speech and statements to law enforcement, would have been ineffective to correct the crux of the problem—that the State did not disclose potentially exculpatory information in time for Auman to conduct an investigation and present his defense at trial.
Neither was a continuance a feasible option in this case, as the Monday trial was the last available trial date that would comport with Auman's statutory right to a speedy trial. In short, any other remedy would have placed Auman in the untenable situation of having to choose between enforcing his constitutional right to a fair trial and exercising his statutory right to have his case be tried within 180 days of arraignment. The district court was well-aware of this predicament, explaining it could either dismiss the case when it did, based on the failure to disclose the dashcam video, or dismiss it later under the Kansas speedy trial statute.
In affirming the district court's dismissal, we are sensitive to the difficult position a prosecutor may find himself or herself in when faced with a law enforcement department that does not promptly respond to discovery requests. Here, the prosecutor submitted numerous requests to the Lawrence Police Department for evidence related to Auman's collision—including multiple requests for dashcam video evidence. In dismissing this case, the district court specifically found that "this is not a blaming game that somehow the prosecution didn't do enough in order to make sure that the discovery was complete," but rather surmised that the issue may have arisen as a result of the computer system used by the State. We have no reason to doubt this assessment, though we note that the State's requests all came within a week of a then-scheduled trial.
Under these circumstances, the COA held that the extreme remedy of dismissal was appropriate.
[Update: the state did not file a PR and the mandate issues on December 17, 2019.]
No comments:
Post a Comment