Taylor v. Illinois

As a sanction for failing to identify a defense witness in response to a pretrial discovery request, an Illinois trial *402judge refused to allow the undisclosed witness to testify. The question presented is whether that refusal violated the petitioner’s constitutional right to obtain the testimony of favorable witnesses. We hold that such a sanction is not absolutely prohibited by the Compulsory Process Clause of the Sixth Amendment and find no constitutional error on the specific facts of this case.1

I

A jury convicted petitioner in 1984 of attempting to murder Jack Bridges in a street fight on…