City & County of San Francisco v. Superior Court

On these proceedings in mandate the single issue concerns the constitutionality of that portion of Evidence Code section 1045, excluding from disclosure to any litigant including one criminally accused: “Information consisting of complaints concerning conduct [of a peace officer] occurring more than five years before the event or transaction which is the subject of the litigation in aid of which discovery or disclosure is sought” (hereafter sometimes the statute; the above italics are ours).

The criminally accused persons of this case, the real parties in interest, were arrested June 21, 1980, in Solano County. The arresting officer had been a member of the San Francisco Police Department from December 1972 through July 1978. Apparently deeming the statute unconstitutional if literally applied, the superior court ordered disclosure of all citizens’ complaints in the officer’s personnel file relating to use of excessive force, racial/ethnic prejudice, or false arrest, for the entire period of his San Francisco employment. Upon the city’s petition, and its complaint that the superior court’s order was unlawful insofar as it disregarded the statute’s five-year limitation,…

I concur.

I agree with my respected colleagues that the challenged statutory provision does not deprive the real parties in interest of due process of *885 law or the equal protection of the law. I would add to their analysis the following observations.

As this court observed in Arcelona v. Municipal Court (1980) 113 Cal.App.3d 523, 529 [ 169 Cal.Rptr. 877 ], “the standards of criminal discovery enunciated in Pitchess evolved ‘in the absence of legislation’ [citations],” and the “scope of disclosure ... once generally permitted under established Pitchess principles ... is now circumscribed under the statutory scheme.” (Id., at pp. 530-531.) Reasonable circumscription is constitutionally permissible, since in a criminal case the right to a fair trial does not require that defendants have access to all potentially exonerating evidence (Pitchess v. Superior Court (1974) 11 Cal.3d 531, 538 [ 113 Cal.Rptr. 897 , 522 P.2d 305 ]), and in determining whether a particular circumscription is reasonable, it is appropriate to take policy considerations other than the defendant’s fair trial interests into account. (People v. Blackburn (1976) 56 Cal.App.3d 685, 690 [ 128 Cal.Rptr. 864 ].)…