Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

Nick Spalding wrote, in <88j3m59at42cs96vqsdumgg3ckk4moslgp@4ax.com>
on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:46:15 +0000:

I sent too soon.  It is. <http://definitions.uslegal.com/r/rosario/>

Something like this?

"For more than thirty years, since our decision in People v Rosario (9
NY2d 286), it has been a fundamental precept of this State's criminal
jurisprudence that the People are obligated to give to the defendant,
for use during cross-examination, any nonconfidential written or
recorded statements of a prosecution witness that relate to the subject
matter of the witness' testimony. Prior to Rosario, the defendant was
entitled to see only those statements that, in the judgment of the trial
court, contained matter that was inconsistent with the witness'
testimony (see, People v Walsh, 262 NY 140, 149).

We concluded in Rosario, however, that the potential impeachment value
of a witness' prior statement could best be determined by the
"single-minded counsel for the accused" (People v Rosario, supra, at
290) and that the trial court's evaluation was an inadequate substitute.
That conclusion, based upon notions of fundamental fairness or, as we
termed it in Rosario, "a right sense of justice" (id. at 289), was later
endorsed by the Legislature, which codified the Rosario holding and
imposed a reciprocal obligation on the defendant (see, CPL 240.45). Our
extension of the principle to pretrial hearings (see, People v Malinsky,
15 NY2d 86) was similarly codified (see, CPL 240.44)."

It's also the Spanish word for 'rosary' - in fact, Spanish was my first
assumption, not Italian.