Court orders lawyer to give DA copy of a DVD the DA made a copy of for him, then lost

The Supreme Judicial Court today ordered a lawyer for a man facing a variety of charges stemming from a 2013 robbery to give prosecutors a copy of the surveillance video used to ID the man for use during his trial.

The video allegedly shows Adnan Tahlil in a Brighton convenience store using an ATM card belonging to a man he and three other people allegedly beat and robbed in Brighton not long before. Police showed the victim the video and he picked out Tahlil and two other men with him as three of his four attackers.

The Suffolk County District Attorney's office made a copy of the video on a DVD for Tahlil's lawyer, then lost its own copy. The day before Tahlil's trial was due to start, prosecutors asked the lawyer to make them a copy. He refused and the case has been stalled for appeals ever since.

Tahlil's attorney argued that even if the video originally came from prosecutors, forcing him to hand over a copy would violate Tahlil's right against self-incrimination under the state constitution and would force the lawyer to testify as to the provenance of the video.

The trial judge who heard the case, and who denied a request from prosecutors to make the lawyer hand over a copy of the video, also said prosecutors were being ridiculously late in making their request the day before the trial was to start.

Prosecutors appealed to the SJC, where a single justice denied their request without comment and the DA's office then appealed that.

In its ruling today, the SJC rejected the defense arguments:

No reasonable basis exists for the defendant's refusal to return to the Commonwealth a copy of the very thing that the Commonwealth gave to him. The defendant does not deny that he has the item. His main argument is that requiring him to provide the Commonwealth with a copy of the DVD would violate his right against self-incrimination. Providing a copy of the DVD to the Commonwealth, however, would not be an incriminating admission; it would not be an admission that any of the individuals who appear in the video is the defendant or that the individuals in the video are engaged in a criminal act. It would merely be the act of the defendant returning to the Commonwealth a copy of something that the Commonwealth provided to him in the first place. At most it would be an admission that the defendant has in his possession the item the Commonwealth gave to him, which, at least in the circumstances of this case, would not be incriminating. There is no basis for the defendant's self-incrimination argument.

In a footnote, the state's highest court also dismissed the lower-court judge's "lateness" argument:

Although it might have behooved the Commonwealth to ask for the DVD sooner than it did, in the circumstances, the alleged "lateness" of the request is not a basis for denying it.

As he's waited for this trial to begin, Tahlil has kept busy.

Four months after his arrest in the Brighton case, he was arrested on charges he was part of a group of five men who robbed a foreign visitor in Chinatown. In September, 2016, he was arrested on drug and currency charges for an incident on the Common - although the charges were later dismissed. Last year, he and two other men were arrested on charges they robbed money exchangers of some $420,000 in Roxbury. His trial on the newest case is scheduled for September.

Innocent, etc.