The subpoena…

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As a wit­ness for tri­als, some­times you can be served with a sub­poena. Subpoenas are offi­cial court doc­u­ments, usu­ally signed by a judge, order­ing you to appear at a court­room at a cer­tain date and time. There is usu­ally a clause in the sub­poena stat­ing that fail­ure to show can result in a war­rant being issued for your arrest.

So that’s sim­ple enough, look at the sub­poena that comes in your name that lists a case you worked on and arrive at the court­room at the date and time written.

Here’s the real­ity of the situation.

1 — Sometimes the issu­ing party sends out a sub­poena with­out the name of the per­son they are sum­mon­ing! That’s right. The sub­poena will be a “generic” one. Kind of hard to know who the sub­poena is for with­out a name on it

2 — Many times the issu­ing party won’t even bother to list the appro­pri­ate depart­ment case num­ber asso­ci­ated with the report the wit­ness has authored. Reasons include, we listed the defendant’s name, or we listed the COURT case num­ber. Well guess what every­one? A defendant’s case name is NOT a unique iden­ti­fier, and the court case num­ber usu­ally doesn’t mean any­thing to the lab you are send­ing the sub­poena to. Usually when the work is done in the lab, it’s before there is even a court case num­ber assigned. I men­tioned this to a pros­e­cu­tor one time and they said “Oh yeah. I never thought of that.”

3 — This doesn’t hap­pen too often, but many times the sub­poena lists a court­room that isn’t the real court­room, just a generic court­room num­ber they give because they don’t know what court­room will actu­ally be used on the day of trial. Well that makes sense, but it’s still dif­fi­cult to be to the cor­rect place on time.

4 — The time that’s on the sub­poena is in some cases not the time that you are esti­mated to be needed to tes­tify, but when the case is expected to start, as in jury selec­tion. This can lead to a lot of wait­ing in the hall­way — maybe days or weeks in some cases. So you bet­ter call ahead.

5 — The best issue is the per­cent­age of cases that you receive sub­poe­nas for that actu­ally go. Based on hun­dreds of sub­poe­nas, my per­sonal expe­ri­ence is that you go on less than 10% (maybe less than 5%) of sub­poe­nas you receive.

Case exam­ple:

I got a call from an ex-employer, let­ting me know they just got a call from a prosecutor’s office want­ing to know if I was going to show up tomor­row on a par­tic­u­lar case. I replied that I didn’t have such a case on my cal­en­dar, and that means I didn’t receive a sub­poena for it. So they faxed me a copy of the sub­poena (sent about a month ear­lier to my ex-employer’s address where I haven’t worked for over a year), along with con­tact infor­ma­tion for the pros­e­cu­tor who called.

I con­firmed I hadn’t seen the sub­poena before, and called the prosecutor’s office. The pros­e­cu­tor was sur­prised I hadn’t got­ten the sub­poena. I let them know there were two rea­sons. The first was the sub­poena was sent out to some­one named “Criminalist”, and that was not my first or last name, so there was no way a sec­re­tary at my ex-employer would know to send me a copy of the sub­poena. The sec­ond rea­son was the sub­poena was sent to some­where I hadn’t worked in over a year. The pros­e­cu­tor was amazed to find this out. I let them know that I’ve per­son­ally informed about a dozen peo­ple at their office that I left that employer, and have given cur­rent con­tact infor­ma­tion, new phone num­ber, fax num­ber, and mail­ing address numer­ous times.

But the point was the pros­e­cu­tor was need­ing me the next day for trial with basi­cally no notice, and the next day I had my cal­en­dar already pretty full. The pros­e­cu­tor said they could prob­a­bly get me to go on the sec­ond day in the morn­ing to fit my sched­ule. I said that would work out well, but please get copies of my case file, since I had no time to make arraign­ments to get a copy from my ex-employer.

All right. Everything seemed to have worked out for the best. I had been noti­fied, and I could fit this last minute trial into my sched­ule with­out some court hav­ing to wait for me.

The next day the trial was can­celled of course. See point #5 above.