Talk:Discovery (law)

Discovery / Disclosure

This is also called disclosure in New Zealand (the term "discovery" is never used"). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.153.39.36 (talk) 00:15, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Template Naming

"Discovery in the United States is unique compared to other common law countries. In the United States, discovery is mostly performed by the litigating parties themselves, with relatively minimal judicial oversight."

That bluntly isn't true. English discovery - now renamed disclosure - is also performed by the parties themselves, with minimal judicial oversight, if indeed any.

193.133.69.162 11:51, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Template Naming

Does anyone else think that "Resolution Without Trial" deserves to be mentioned in the Civil Procedure template? There does not seem to be any mention of it between Discovery and Lawsuit.

Also, the term "Lawsuit" seems sort of vague in the template. The entire procedural process is more of the "lawsuit" as opposed to the portion of the litigation after Pre-Trial Procedure and before Appeal. Perhaps "Trial" would be a more approriate term?

Criminal discovery

Criminal Discovery is fairly easy to discribe. Discovery is a two fold process and is part of the defense and prosecutions tools in any court case.

Once an individual is accussed (arrested) for a crime. His/her defense attourney will write to the discovery desk at the town where the individual was arrested asking for discovery. In the case of a criminal arrest or D.W.I./ D.U.I. arrest the following is collected for discovery. 1. A copy of the complaint. 2. A copy of the Arrest report. 3. A copy of the Police officers report (Which may include witmesses statements). 5. A copy of any / all lab reports and / or Alcotest reports. Alcotest calibration certificates,copies of any / all video (usually from the officers in car video camera) which is copied to a dvd.

Once everything is gathered and copied, the defense lawyer is billed for same prior to it being released. Upon payment, same is released. the prosecutor also gets the exact same package as the defense attourney in order to prosecute the case.

If the defense attourney or prosecutor has additional discovery that has not been shared with the other. The judge will most likely rule it is inadmissable. (in other words, " Whats good for the goose is good for the gandor").

Inthe event the court case is being heard at a higher level court, such as at the county level. All discovery is sent to the county prosecutor and the defense attourney must apply for the discovery via the county prosecutor.

Although individuals can apply for discovery themselves, there are laws preventing them from receiving certain things such as addresses of witnesses. A defense attourney on the other hand is like a disintrested party and officer of the court for which that certain information will be / should be held from his client.

Check your state laws on discovery, they may be different from here.

still the article 23 Mar 2013 still does not cover discovery rules in criminal cases

How about a treatment of rules of discovery in criminal law written by someone with handle on the subject, but who can put it in lay terms?

Just for the US, the major rules of "Brady material" (discoverable evidence) Brady-Jencks-Giglio were originally formulated at the federal level in federal criminal cases, but they have trickled down to the state court levels too.

The rules covering dicovery evidence are called Brady, Jencks and Giglio, but the evidence covered by these three rules are usually called "Brady material". Legal discussion of one ruleusually mentions the other two as they are interrelated.

The Brady rule was a result of Brady v Maryland 373 U.S. 83 (1963). The prosecutor (government) must disclose evidence that would prove the defendant's innocence or would impeach the credibility of a government witness. Brady also applies to evidence that would mitigate the sentence if a defendant if found guilty. Brady applies to evidence related to the defendant's innocence or to the level of his culpability.

The Jencks Act was passed by Congress in response to the ruling in Jencks v. United States 353 U.S. 657 (1957), now part of the US Code of Laws 18 U.S.C. § 3500. The government is required to produce any witness statement in the government's possession (police interview, grand jury destimony, affidavit) relating to the subject of the witness' testimony.

Giglio rule was a result of Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972): any deal with a witness (that might call their credibility into question) must be disclosed in court. Any plea bargain or deal in exchange for testimony should be disclosed to the defense as part of the discovery process.

Just for the US rules, I had search several articles,

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_disclosure
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jencks_Act
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giglio_v._United_States

when there should be a summary of the subject under the article Discovery (law). --Naaman Brown (talk) 01:50, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Dictionary definition should go

Copying dictionary definitions wholesale is inappropriate for Wikipedia because (1) we have Wikitionary for that and (2) we may have a possible copyright violation. Citing Black's and quoting a couple of words is fair use. Copying entire dictionary entries out of Black's is not fair use. Any reason why I shouldn't delete the entire dicdef? --Coolcaesar 07:55, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Add these?

Terminology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_numbering

Electronic Discovery

TIFF files

Concordance, Summation, DBTextworks

Services - www.lit.com, www.stratify.com, etc...

This article needs work

It looks like someone put their outline summarizing the FRCP in here. That's not really appropriate for an encyclopedia article. I think for most laypersons that's too much detail. Even Joseph Glannon doesn't go through the rules like that! --Coolcaesar 07:29, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I traced the edit history and it looks like User:Saw192837 put in most of that garbage from the FRCP. Either Saw192837 is not a lawyer or is not very bright. No intelligent lawyer teaches or discusses discovery (or any matter in civil procedure, for that matter) in a mechanical sequence straight from the structure of the rules. You start with the BIG PICTURE (i.e., here is the public policy underlying discovery, here is the basic chronological sequence, here is how discovery fits into how you properly litigate a case) and then quote bits and pieces from the rules as necessary to show how the system of discovery is codified into the rules. If someone doesn't give me a good reason soon to keep the rules in here, I'm going to dump them and rewrite this pigpen from scratch in a month or two. --Coolcaesar 06:53, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Funny how it's been two years and no one's cleaned up this mess. Because all us working lawyers are too busy to deal with this pigpen when there are more important articles like Law of the United States to attend to. This is one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia---orphan articles written by amateurs which no one has the time, energy, or interest to clean up. --Coolcaesar (talk) 09:07, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Almost four years later. As I pointed out, no one has the time or energy to deal with this mess. And I'm way too busy with Lawyer, Law firm, and Law of the United States as usual. --Coolcaesar (talk) 12:49, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

I just deleted the whole "outline" section, plus the Black's Law Dictionary definition. bd2412 T 04:13, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

In case anyone has a use for it, I've put it at Civil discovery under United States federal law. bd2412 T 04:16, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

Citation needed for "hundreds of thousands of documents"

I just looked at this, for an example of paperwork involved in some court cases: http://www.geekosystem.com/google-oracle-costs/

Would something like that make for a suitable citation? --Hugovdm (talk) 12:22, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Here is another possible citation, it's the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, talking about the huge number of documents. Go to 1hr6m

http://www.c-span.org/Events/Chief-Justice-John-Roberts-Addresses-Univ-of-Alabama-Law-School/17353-1/

JoshNarins (talk) 15:31, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

United Kingdom

The current section deals with England and Wales only. Northern Ireland and Scotland aren't covered.

Why does this article make it appear as though Discovery is only a civil procedure with no relevance to criminal law?

Who the hell wrote this this way? Even if they did not feel competent to comment on Discovery in criminal procedures, they still should have left it clear that there WAS relevance in criminal procedures and pointed to a stub encouraging someone knowledgeable to fill it in. The title of it is "discovery (law)", not "discovery (civil law)". The lead and entire gist of this article makes it sound as though Discovery is a civil procedure only, which is definitely not the case. OBloodyHell (talk) 02:25, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I also find that wrong, but will do nothing about it (per tradition). InedibleHulk (talk) 04:48, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Recently there has been a lot in the news about disclosure in criminal cases in England and Wales, but there does not seem to be anything relevant in Wikipedia. Someone knowledgeable could edit the article using the historical section of [1] JonH (talk) 21:30, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

The obvious reason is that discovery traditionally didn't exist in criminal actions and wasn't imported into criminal procedure until relatively recently. It's because such discovery was nonexistent that Brady v. Maryland was so revolutionary. --Coolcaesar (talk) 08:25, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Just realized Kessler expanded her 2005 article into a 2017 book

Kessler's book is available on Google Books here. I haven't had time to go through all of it, but what I've seen is fascinating. If anyone wants to replace the citations to Kessler's article in this article with citations to pages in Kessler's book, please do. It looks like her discussion of the revolution in discovery brought about by James Kent begins on page 86.

I am going to try to get to a research university library sometime this fall to get full access to the book itself. Coolcaesar (talk) 15:32, 21 September 2023 (UTC)