What Are Permissible Discovery Sanctions Against the Defendant?

In State v. Cooper, issued last week, the Court of Appeals reversed the defendant’s conviction for first-degree murder of his wife and ordered a new trial. The case has drawn considerable media attention; recent news reports indicate that the State intends to petition the state Supreme Court for review. This blog post focuses on one aspect of the decision by the Court of Appeals—the constitutional limits on discovery sanctions against the defendant, which previous North Carolina decisions had not closely examined. In Taylor v. Illinois, 484 U.S. 400 (1988), the U.S. Supreme Court considered the appropriateness of sanctions against the defendant for discovery violations. The Court recognized that the Compulsory Process Clause of the Sixth Amendment gives defendants the right to present a defense. The Court then found that preclusion of a defense witness’s testimony as a sanction for a discovery violation may violate this right (rejecting the State’s argument that a discovery sanction would never violate the right to present a defense) but that preclusion is not automatically a violation (rejecting the defendant’s argument that preclusion would never be an appropriate sanction). The Court declined to announce a “comprehensive set of standards to guide the exercise of discretion in every possible case” (id. at 414), but it provided some direction about when preclusion, perhaps the most drastic sanction against the defense, may be permissible. In upholding the sanction imposed by the trial court, the Court stated that this “case fits into the category of willful misconduct in which the severest [...]