My question involves traffic court in the State of: California.
I got a citation for illegal right turn on red California vehicle code 22101(d). Trial is Monday 05/04/2015 and I served a timely discovery request (about 20 days before trial) and I have received a discovery response.
Given my limited legal experience, I returned to the Orange County Sheriff (police agency that issued the citation) with a process server to issue a subpoena so that the custodian of records would appear to testify to the documents they gave to me through discovery. I spoke with the person who reviews subpoenas and records requests and she told me that they would not testify to the authenticity of the records because they were completed by the officer, who would be appearing already. Instead, they said if I insisted on serving the subpoena, that they would have counsel appear on Monday with a motion to quash and they told me that I could introduce the evidence at trial because it was given to me through pre-trial discovery.
My understanding is that, to introduce these documents/audio/etc, I must first lay a foundation by asking the witness (officer) whether he created such documents, the method by which they were kept since their creation, and the chain of custody. So I am worried about the following possibility:
If the officer says he cannot be sure that the documents/audio/etc. that I am asking about were his originals or if he says that he handed them off to another sheriff's dept. staff member after his shift and he has no idea about the business processes they follow or the chain of custody before they were sent to me in discovery, what do I do?
In other words, what is a fool-proof way to introduce (into evidence) the documents produced in the discovery response I got?
P.S. I am sorry if this has been answered before but I searched dozens of threads here and all of them dealt with how to ask for discovery or motion to compel or dismiss when discovery was not forthcoming. For those curious, I noticed that the diagram drawn by the officer does not accurately demonstrate the intersection (he drew a 3-way intersection instead of a 4-way) AND the diagram makes it appear that he may misstate his location so as to say he could see the red light when I made my turn (in fact he was across the intersection so could not have seen the right turn light controlling my direction). Also, I caught a sheriff's officer on the street and asked about the cameras in their vehicles and he said every vehicle has one and they are "always on". This is relevant in my case because I asked for video of the infraction and stop but only received audio. I will elicit the fact about the camera from the officer in testimony and point out that there is exculpatory evidence that exists which was not provided during discovery and that officer's testimony should be viewed with distrust given the existence of more compelling evidence (the video) per CA evidence code 412.

