Florida is like several states out west.

I am not a lawyer, but how would a self-representing client get justice under these rules?

Connecticut seems to over-react, denying rights of accused in order to prevent those few who would target accusers or witnesses.

As a client, I would be one of those to balk hard at this. As someone once accused in Connecticut, if I had not had access to the prosecution’s initial documents (police report and summons) my lawyers would not have won the dismissal in my case.

Without lots of money, I like most defendants, would never have been able to afford the research I did, all legal, all far from the accusers. Plus, some research only the defendant can do.

My lawyers, like most, never would have compiled as much research as I either. Almost none ever do.

Take a simple thing like the accuser’s address on the police report. After weeks researching public records including copious numbers of civil suits she and family members had filed, it because clear that she had a pattern of always giving a different address to authorities than where she actually lived. This was a minor but interesting detail. Also, the addresses were one of the ways to confirm her identify in those public documents that I uncovered that bore her name.

She had been convicted of a crime of dishonesty and I acquired a certified copy of that. Prosecution never turned that over.

She and her family members had sued everyone under the sun for motor vehicle and slip and falls over decades, changing her injury history in her cases, often altering names, using names they “goe by” or don’t go by.

I filled notebooks that gave my lawyers an extremely ample, luxurious sense of context.

If I had not had the minimum court documents with details like address or DOB, something, anything, I would not have been able to cofirm identities were the same in these other lawsuits.

There are a ton of unpredictable ways defendants access to details helps in their defense. Defendants have a right to defend themselves.

Again, in my case, I pulled records that had my accuser’s actual address so my lawyers could try to go interview her

I read depositions in personal injury cases of hers that showed a marked lack of credibility noted by arbitrators and the courts.

All into the notebooks provided to my attorneys. All pulled from public records, all starting with clues in the police report and ticket.

Many starting from tiny details the rules committee would have you redact.

Without access to that information, I wouldn’t have known that among the wierd phone calls I had received right after I was accused was from someone with the same family name – not the family name in the police report, but another one.

I also wouldn’t have uncovered what looks like a family slip and fall ring that has been going along undetected, and continues to this day actually but now not so undetected.

I broke not a single law. All public record searches.

I would not have dreamed going near my accuser. I wouldn’t have in any scenario whatsoever, but in this case, one top of that, the family was chock full of felons, so I was terrified of them.

She, a stranger on the street, had already falsely accused me, was already a convicted liar, and I had no victim rights or protections as the accused, so she could do it again and again.

My lawyers based a very strong ‘motion in limine’ entirely on my research and nothing else.

They would be the first to tell you that.

I probably would still have been able to acquire records showing that the arresting officer, who had fabricated in my case, had been the subject of a motion by attorney accusing fraud for statements made in a court conference in a civil case.

But most of what I acquired was possible only because i had access to the original charging documents.

The case was dismissed.

We never got a shred of discovery, and what we got, was willfully inaccurate. As I expected.

What I got on my own was important in several ways:

1. Most of it was information the prosecution would not have turned over anyway.

2. It was stuff that the prosecution would not have turned over in time — I am not required to wait to begin work on defending myself. The prosecution doesn’t get to demand I sit on my hands until they say I can start defending myself. (There are scenarios where early investigation acquires information that isn’t available later.I shouldn’t even have to make a showing of that)

3. The prosecution withholds and lies constantly here, constantly.

4. Certain of my research skills don’t equal anyone else’s I know and only I might recognize a name or know the significance of an address buried in piles of records, deep in tangential research, that a researcher couldn’t know ahead of time might be significant and wouldn’t have turned over to me. So there is NO PROXY, NO SUBSTITUTE for the defendant.

For one example of the lies these immune prosecutors enjoyed telling: We received exactly one piece of paper in discovery, beyond the police report, right up to the verge of the trial.

On it was written by the prosecutor that there were no audio 911 recordings when there were.

I acquired copies of some of the 911 audio files independently through FOI while my lawyers, apparently, were willing to take the prosecution’s word for it — never a good idea, but apparently it is bad etiquette here not to pretend the honor of other lawyers, even prosecutors.

Connecticut’s approach essentially is to run a racket in the courts that would TEND to convict innocent people, that would tend to conceal corrupt practices, that would tend to obstruct truth from easily being unearthed, so on and so on.

Independent investigation is important. To say that my case should depend on what the prosecution decides to turn over trivializes me. It puts the prosecution in charge of the defense. And that is what would have happened if I had not had access to the detailed informnation that made my research possible.

The idea that I should in any way be put at the mercy of the prosecution, with its immunities, for my defense, its timing and its lawful activities is dangerous.

Connecticut’s alienation of defendants from their defense has other consequences as well. It tends to foster this perception that if defendants don’t sit on their hands, if they do any research at all, however innocuous, they are out of line. Prosecutors get downright alarmed.

The prosecution in my case threatened charges upon learning that I had pulled court records and turned them over to my attorneys. I got this sense that in Connecticut I didn’t have the right to defend myself.

I pulled public records every day as part of my job. Now, suddenly, the prosecution was considering how to charge that as a crime. They didn’t, but they made that explicit, It was intimidating and wrong and that fear hung over me throughout the case.

That response definitely emanated from these sorts of rules in Connecticut that segregates the client/defense from her lawyer/defense. There is no other word for the proseutor’s response to my research but plain old intimidation, but because of these rules, no one seems to recognize it for what it is.

The prosecutors had no right to try to stop me from defending myself.

I have never seen a prosecutor react that way in states out west where these rules don’t exist, rules I am familiar with because of my jobs out west doing court research, not as a defendant.

Prosecutors everywhere will threaten to up charges but not as a direct response to the beleif that you don’t have the right to defend yourself.

Look at someone like me, falsely accused and with no criminal history whatsoever, or history of violence, intimidation, anything. Why do I have to contend with obstacles that compromise my ability to defend myself? It’s overkill.

I would not have won my case without that research, weak as the charge was. And no one would have become aware of the full extent of the activities of the family of the woman who accused me.

It’s bad law.

If a defendant is thought to be likely to harass witnesses or the accused, the prosecution should be forced to move and show cause why the defendant should be barred from access to evidence.

Or was it easy to locate them through other means, like Lexis or the internet?

The good news is that lawyers routinely get everything they need at arraignment.

When this practice started (not out of any formal rule — just a policy one day adopted out of nowhere by the DA’s office), we filed many motions seeking the redacted information for investigative purposes. Result? Judges got pissy with defense counsel for using too much paper.

As an aside, have you run into a problem with snitches getting ahold of your clients’ discovery and fabricating an “admission” based upon their review of that discovery?

I have never had that problem. Yet.

As an aside, have you run into a problem with snitches getting ahold of your clients’ discovery and fabricating an “admission” based upon their review of that discovery?