Let’s say you live on the East Coast of the United States and you vacation in a far-off state, say, Alaska. While there, you witness a crime. You report what you’ve seen to the local police. The next day, you are due to to fly home. The police want you to stay on for further questioning and maybe to view a lineup they plan to hold several days in the future. However …
your airline ticket is not transferrable to another date;
you can’t afford any more nights in the hotel;
you’ve used up all your vacation time and if you don’t return home, your job is in jeopardy.
Who picks up the cost of your new plane ticket and hotel stay? If you want to leave Alaska on schedule to return to your job, can the police compel you to stay?
Then, let’s say the police eventually arrest someone and bring him to trial. You are their key witness. Who pays for your travel expenses to testify at the trial? What happens if your employer won’t give you the time off to go to the trial? What happens if you fail to appear as a witness in another state?
I hasten to add, I am not in this situation and am not seeking legal advice. I’m just wondering, is all.
When I worked for a law firm that dealt with such things, witnesses who appeared on behalf of the defendant were paid for by the defendant–hotel room, food, etc. The subpoena is supposed to take care of time off work but as a practical matter you don’t really have a lot of clout in holding someone in contempt of court if he’s not IN the court (because he’s in another state ignoring your subpoena).
The DA has a bit more clout. My assumption is that any witness called to testify against the defendant would have expenses paid by the DA as part of their case.
But in fact, quite a lot can be done with depositions if your testimony is that important. There are also some precedents for teleconferencing testimony.
I’m guessing that the cops would let you go home, particularly if they didn’t have anyone to put in a lineup at that time and not enough evidence to, say, arrest YOU.
For some reason this reminded me of a client we had who got a DUI the night before his wedding. (He was from out of state.) He didn’t want to surrender his driver’s license, as he was supposed to, because he knew that would mean he couldn’t get onto a plane the next day to go on his honeymoon in Hawaii. One of the guys I worked for got out of bed in the middle of the night and went off to go deal with this–he charged a lot for it, I’m sure–because the police were being really hardass and seemed to be perfectly delighted to either keep the guy in jail over the weekend if he didn’t turn over his DL (so he’d miss his wedding) or miss his honeymoon cause he couldn’t get on the plane without a DL. Once the lawyer was there things changed pretty drastically and he ended up not even getting convicted. It was one of many successes for this guy, who is definitely in MY rolodex in case I ever get arrested for anything! But the point I was going for was, if the cops want you to stick around badly enough, they have the means to do so.
I’ve wondered about this myself, but in my case there’s a good chance I’d be leaving the country, not just the state (I’d love to be patriotic and see more of Canada, but you folks south of the border are much better set up for disabled tourists!). Would things be any different regarding wanting to hold on to me as a witness to a crime if it was obvious I intended to leave the country?
Note that this is the information age, and there is no reason that police couldn’t arrainge to interview a witness (who they are sure is not involved in the crime) via telephone, email, teleconference, etc.
I was a victim of a crime while returning home from a neighboring state. (kids throwing large rocks at windshields of cars on interstate highway) I live in the southwest, so neighboring state implies several hundred miles.
The perpetrators were caught. I was so pissed that I was willing to foot the expense of returning to testify against them. It wasn’t needed as the kids confessed. Too bad the police/DA couldn’t be bothered to press charges.