So sometime last summer a bunch of cars on my street were broken into a various things were stolen. First I knew about is was when my neighbor knocked on my door the next morning. His neighbor’s porch camera caught the thief breaking into my car and searching I found that around $40-$60 that I had stashed for emergencies in the car’s ash tray was missing. I also think that I may have left an expired drivers license in my glove compartment that was no longer there. I talk to the cops a little bit leave my information and then go on with my life, figuring that without a clear ID, the police had better things to do and this would be the last I heard of it.
Fast forward to a few days ago when I get a letter in the mail saying that I had been subpoenaed to appear in court in April at the trial of someone I had never heard of. Calling the court it sounds like there are dozens of witnesses besides myself and some 23 charges against the guy, mostly theft, and the court case was opened back in August.
Aside from this letter no one has approached me to discuss what I know since the incident. I figure that since I didn’t witness anything I’m probably a minor witness and just there to add to the list of things he stole. Also since the time of the incident I have found my expired driver’s license in a drawer at home so he didn’t take it.
This is my first time doing any of this. Is it normal to be subpeonaed without anyone contacting you before? Will someone contact me later or do I just show up on at the court at the day and time and hope they tell me what to do? Any other advice.?
It’s pretty normal. If this was a big case and you were a major witness you would have been contacted. You are a victim so you can testify as to what was taken in your car. It’s standard to subpoena all the victims. I’m going to predict it will be settled before it gets to that.
I’ve been subpoenaed twice. My two anecdotes may not be particularly relevant, but they may ease your mind if you are at all stressed about it.
The first one was because I witnessed a guy slug a woman (who happened to be holding a baby at the time). I arrived in court to learn that the case had been settled and that I was not needed.
The second one arrived to my place of work while I was away on vacation. It gave a date by which I must respond and said that my failure to respond by that date will result in a warrant being generated for me. By the time I returned from vacation and read the letter, the date was 10 days prior. Uh oh.
So I called the court phone number that was listed. Got a recording. Left a message. Did the same the next day, and the next. Finally, about a week later, I got through to the court clerk and explained my situation. Her response: “Don’t worry about it, people never respond to those things.”
Myself and 2 others witnessed an auto accident. A young gal with her 3 day old driver’s license blew threw a red light and t-boned another car, the woman in the car that was hit was hurt pretty bad. The young girl claimed she had a green light. Her attorney father was going to fight everything claiming bias towards his young blonde daughter. We were subpoenaed to her trial. The guy from the prosecutor’s office took us aside before the trial began and told us what to expect. All he needed from us was to tell the truth. Before the trial began the girl’s attorney offered a plea deal and the prosecutor agreed. I got a day off with pay for my half an hour at the courthouse.
Depends on the court/jurisdiction but probably not. Jurors are called to come in & may sit on any trial that is needed whereas he’s a witness for a specific case & may or may not sit around part or all of the day. It’s more programming (& at taxpayer dollars) to build a system that can be that specific.
Call and find out if it’s on (if possible) and short of that definitely show up when you’re supposed to, but don’t expect much of anything exciting. As already stated there’s a good chance you’ll be told the matter has been settled and you can just go home. Even if the trial goes ahead, your role sounds no more complex than to repeat what you told the cops that night, and probably not much else. I wouldn’t expect any prep-talks.
The one time I was called as a witness to a criminal trail (for assault), I was the only eye witness, the accused was self-representing, and his star defense witness (his wife) was the one he’d beaten up. My word was all the prosecution had to go on because no police witnessed anything, and the victim/wife denied it all and defended her attacker.
Even under those circumstances all I got immediately before the trial was a 30-second standard “sit over there, you’ll be asked to step out for a while (while some other evidence is presented), wait until you’re called, just tell the truth, and if the question from the other side is allowed it’s probably a fair question so just answer”
There were no prior meetings or witness prep to speak of. For your case I’d expect little to nothing memorable to occur,
Guilty, probation and a criminal record (first offense). It wasn’t even close.
I found out later from the police that they’d had numerous calls on this guy in the past, but that he’d always smooth-talked his way out of it somehow. The guy was way overconfident and his entire master plan to beat the assault charge was to ask me what the ages of his children were.
I had glanced at his crying wife loading 3 kids into the backseat of a car in the driveway right before he came tearing out of the house and did what he did. He thought if he could prove I was mistaken about how old they were, that my entire testimony would be unreliable and that he’d be found not guilty. He thought about this brilliant plan for 6 months prior.
This is what I would recommend. Call the attorney who issued the subpoena. Give them your contact information. The may be able to narrow down the time they need you (I.e. It may be a multi day trial, but they don’t plan on calling you until day 2, or on day 1 but after lunch). If they know how to reach you, they can also let you know if the case resolves and they don’t end up needing you at all.
Bring a book, don’t count on being allowed to play with your phone or tablet. Bring snacks. Bring a jacket, if you don’t wear it, you will want to sit on it cause those benches get pretty hard after a while.
Depends on when the defendant pleas. I’ve never been called as a witness but once as a juror I and the others went through the whole voir dire process and were seated as jurors, broke for lunch then cooled our heels in the hallway an extra forty five minutes. When we were let into the courtroom no one was there but the bailiff and judge who told us the defendant had plead guilty to an offered charge and thanked us for our time.
I suspect the defendant was looking at the fifteen of us (three spares) looking at him and decided the shit got real. I would imagine the witnesses called had a similar process.
I’m kind of surprised you’re subpoenaed straight to the trial rather than to a deposition. Especially for an incidental or otherwise unimportant witness, would it not be more straightforward for the prosecution to take depositions beforehand and relay those in the trial, rather than marching a bunch of people through the process without even knowing what the witnesses might say? Or for these (relatively) small potato cases is it just not worth the attorney’s time to do all that discovery so they hash it out during the trial since it’s a slam dunk anyway?
Depositions in criminal cases are exceedingly rare. However, witness interviews are always a good idea In routine misdemeanor cases the prosecution just doesn’t have (or want to use) the resources to interview all witnesses before trial.
At the start of my career I did criminal defense in municipal court. The prosecutors were handed files on the day of trial. The files consisted of the police report. A clerk had issued subpoenas to witnesses listed by police. There was no pre-trial preparation whatsoever (some exceptions, of course). THe prosecutor would call the cop and witnesses to testify about what they saw or did. The cop would bring any “evidence” to court. All kinds of strange things would happen at trial. It was probably the most fun I had as a lawyer. We won about 50% of our cases, which should never happen in criminal court. Partly because a good number of our clients were actually innocent and the prosecution would have dropped those cases if they had prepared them better.
In their defense, there were 1000s of cases, and most ended up with guilty pleas. It would be a huge drain on resources to work up all of those cases for trial. In cases where felonies were alleged, it was a very different situation.
I am almost certain you are there to establish what was stolen from your car. Although your neighbor’s camera can probably establish that your car was broken into and possibly by whom , I’ve never seen a security camera that could tell if money was removed from an ashtray.
Someone has to establish it’s not the defendant’s own car. It can be done other ways, but by far the easiest is to have the real owner testify “that’s my car and I did not give that guy permission to enter it and take that stuff.”
Unfortunately the notice I received didn’t include this information, the only name associated with it was the court’s administrative clerk and the only phone number was the general line to the District court of my county (in tiny print at the top of the notice). This is why it was so baffling. If it hadn’t guessed what incident was being asked about (since it was my only interaction with law enforcement in years) and worked my way though the courts phone system to find someone to give me a clue I would have absolutely no idea what I was even supposed to testify about.