State v. Dunnaway, 4D98-4337.
| Decision Date | 17 January 2001 |
| Docket Number | No. 4D98-4337.,4D98-4337. |
| Citation | 778 So.2d 378 |
| Parties | STATE of Florida, Appellant, v. Lorenzo DUNNAWAY, Appellee. |
| Court | Florida District Court of Appeals |
Robert A. Butterworth, Attorney General, Tallahassee, and Ettie Feistmann, Assistant Attorney General, West Palm Beach, for appellant.
Mark Wilensky of Dubiner & Wilensky, P.A., West Palm Beach, for appellee.
We affirm the trial court's order granting a new trial pursuant to Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.600. For this court to overturn such an order, "there must be a clear showing that the trial court abused the broad discretion accorded it in ruling on a motion for a new trial." State v. Hart, 632 So.2d 134, 134 (Fla. 4th DCA 1994) (citations omitted). "In addition, a stronger showing is required to overturn an order granting a new trial than to overturn an order denying a new trial." Id. at 135.
With admirable candor, the trial judge indicated that "this [was] a case that [she] rushed to trial too fast." This recognition that the defense did not have adequate time to prepare for trial supports the conclusion that the defense was not able to discover the testimony of the new witness by the use of due diligence. The judge found that the difficulty in locating the witness was exacerbated by "the particular milieu in which this crime occurred."
The judge was on the scene during the development of this case. She presided over the trial. Unlike an appellate court, she is fully informed as to the equities, the subtleties of the case, and the difficulties of trial preparation. It is exceedingly rare for a trial judge to say that a case was rushed to trial too fast. The law encourages such candor by trial judges and defers to their attempt to correct the injustices that occasionally ensue from the hurried pace of crowded dockets in busy criminal courtrooms. On this record, the trial court's ruling is sustainable either under Rules 3.600(a)(3) or 3.600(b)(8).
AFFIRMED.
FARMER, J., concurs specially with opinion.
Our system of criminal justice is not based on multiple trials for the same case. Both sides are usually given only one chance to offer all their evidence. We do not suffer either the state or the accused to keep doing it until they get it right. The justification is that they will have a fair chance to get ready for their day in court. With reasonable preparation time we can be confident of the reliability of the outcome.
It is not unfair or illogical to insist that a defendant produce all the evidence and witnesses at the first and only trial if he is given sufficient preparation time. When a defendant claims afterwards that newly discovered evidence would change the result, the law can then understandably require that such evidence should have been unknown by him or his counsel at the trial and that they could not, by due diligence, have discovered the evidence in time to use it. Torres-Arboleda v. Dugger, 636 So.2d 1321, 1324-1325 (Fla.1994); Jones v. State, 591 So.2d 911, 916 (Fla.1991), cert. denied, 516 U.S. 1057, 116 S.Ct. 731, 133 L.Ed.2d 682 (1996).
In this case, however, the trial judge determined that defendant did not, in fact, have a reasonable opportunity to prepare his defense at the original trial.1 Because he was not given ample time to make ready, he cannot be considered as having voluntarily decided to forego producing absent witnesses and evidence at the trial. In this circumstance, he should not have to show that the evidence he would adduce at a new trial was unknown to him or unavailable at his first trial.
Given unreasonably short preparation time, the law cannot possibly hold that the accused should nonetheless have produced all the evidence that a fair amount of preparation time would have allowed him to develop. The denial of sufficient time to do something contradicts the contention that with diligent and harder work someone could still have done it.2
Unfairly rushing a case to trial means that any reasonable confidence in the reliability of the outcome is considerably weakened. Appellate judges are not very likely to enhance confidence in such an outcome by simply pronouncing the result fair—less so by declaring that the accused should have been even more assiduous while he was being unfairly hurried to trial. Thus when a trial judge finds that a case has been unfairly pushed to a precipitate trial, that fact alone should be sufficient to justify a new trial without any further inquiry into whether the defendant could have mounted a reasonable defense at the rushed trial if only he had somehow been more persevering.
On this basis I concur in Judge Gross's opinion.
The Defendant filed an amended motion for a new trial on the grounds of newly discovered evidence. The motion alleged, inter alia, that "neither Lorenzo Dunnaway nor his undersigned counsel could have discovered and produced such evidence at trial, in that neither witness was apparently interviewed by the police officers investigating the case, and Ms. Bailey lives in Pahokee, Florida, which is a substantial distance from Riviera Beach, Florida, the city in which the subject incident took place."
At the hearing, Terry Graves, the Defendant's brother, testified that through his own investigation conducted after the Defendant's conviction, he found Bailey and discovered from her that the victim had a weapon. Although he had asked around for information before the conviction, he testified that he did not actively pursue anything until after the conviction. Once he started actively pursuing his investigation, it took him a week or two to find Bailey. He testified that he expended a tremendous amount of effort to find her and that because the community was comprised predominately of African Americans and there was an absence of trust in the area, he did not believe a private investigator could have obtained the same results.
Laura Bailey's unrebutted testimony was that she has lived at her parent's home at the same address in Pahokee for eighteen years, the telephone number has been the same for the last twenty-nine years, her phone number and address are in the phone book, and she has not been hiding from anyone.
The Defendant testified that he was precluded from...
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