Legal Question in Criminal Law in California

How are you accessing a computer in the jail? Most correctional facilities do not allow inmates to have access to the Internet.

It is a crime for an attorney to reveal the address of telephone number of any witness or victim which is disclosed in discovery. Penal Code �1054.2(a)(3). A violation could also cost your lawyer his license to practice law.

There may be very good reasons not to give a client copies of police reports.

For instance, jails are crawling with snitches who would make up lies about their own mother if they thought it would get them a lesser sentence. One of the most common ways snitches get information about cases is by reading another inmate's police reports. This is known as "booking" somebody. The snitch then contacts the detectives in the case and claims the other inmate confessed all of the details in the police reports, and the prosecutor argues that the snitch couldn't possibly know all of those details unless the defendant told him.

In other cases, a defendant may be in danger if other inmates read the details of police reports, so a defense attorney won't want to have those reports floating around the jail.

If it is a complex case with hundreds or thousands of pages of discovery, it may not be practical to have you read all of the reports without giving you a copy.