Rudy Giuliani is staring down hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and sanctions amid numerous lawsuits in addition to the new criminal charges – related to his work for Donald Trump after the 2020 election.
he may ultimately get sanctioned with negative inferences (instruction to the jury that they should assume anything Guliani didn’t turn over was basically a smoking gun against him)
Is there precedent for this? It’s not like he’s refusing to turn over records, he’s just unable to due to financial hardships (allegedly, he could be lying I guess). If it were anybody else, that would be an incredibly fucked up thing for the courts to do to somebody.
Your right, it’s usually when the defendant is engaging in bad faith, like purposely hiding documents. The case I remember, defendant intentionally refused to turn over a bad document and might even have destroyed it, but one of the law clerks at defendant’s firm decided to be a whistleblower. I don’t know if there’s specific precedent for this if the grounds are just I’m to broke to conduct a search, but it’s possible. It’s usually a last resort, the judge will just keep issueing fines and attorneys fees for a few months. But at some point the case needs to move forward in the interst of justice, and the judge is going to have to figure out a way to do that if Guliani won’t turn over the documents needed for the case. I doubt the “I’m too broke” excuse is going to hold up forever.
Is there precedent for this? It’s not like he’s refusing to turn over records, he’s just unable to due to financial hardships (allegedly, he could be lying I guess). If it were anybody else, that would be an incredibly fucked up thing for the courts to do to somebody.
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Your right, it’s usually when the defendant is engaging in bad faith, like purposely hiding documents. The case I remember, defendant intentionally refused to turn over a bad document and might even have destroyed it, but one of the law clerks at defendant’s firm decided to be a whistleblower. I don’t know if there’s specific precedent for this if the grounds are just I’m to broke to conduct a search, but it’s possible. It’s usually a last resort, the judge will just keep issueing fines and attorneys fees for a few months. But at some point the case needs to move forward in the interst of justice, and the judge is going to have to figure out a way to do that if Guliani won’t turn over the documents needed for the case. I doubt the “I’m too broke” excuse is going to hold up forever.