A judge scolded the Johnston County district attorney's staff Tuesday for failing to turn over hundreds of pages of evidence to a defense attorney until days before the start of a murder trial.

Cumberland County Superior Court Judge E. Lynn Johnson called the misstep "egregious" and said that if the crime weren't so serious he would have thrown out the case. Such a reprimand is extremely rare, legal experts said Wednesday.

A first-degree murder trial against Tiffany Bassett in the death of her boyfriend, Keith West, was set to start Monday. It has been postponed until April.

In North Carolina, prosecutors are obligated to turn over all "discovery" -- evidence such as medical records, investigators' notes and crime scene photographs -- to defense attorneys as they receive them.

Defense Attorney Robert Denning said he filed no fewer than 30 motions -- a number he called unusually high -- asking a judge to order prosecutors to turn over various pieces of evidence since West's death in July 2006.

This isn't the first time the trial has been delayed because of lateness in turning over evidence to the defense. Last fall, Denning asked a judge to continue the trial when he received new pieces of evidence in the week before that trial was set to begin.

Among the 437 pages of discovery delivered to Denning on March 12 were hand-written notes from the crime scene investigator along with notes from investigators' interviews with several witnesses. Of particular interest, the judge notes in his order, were the investigator's notes on West's time of death.

Johnston County District Attorney Susan Doyle said her assistant prosecutor, Greg Butler, discovered the missing notes of the investigator as he prepared for trial last week. Doyle said a detective referred to materials that Butler did not know about and that Butler eventually discovered hundreds of pages of notes produced 20 months ago that he had never seen. Doyle said it's possible those documents had been turned over previously to another prosecutor handling the case but that last week they were not on file in their office.

"It was a totally inadvertent mistake," Doyle said. "It was not an intentional withholding of information that we suddenly sprung on the defense."

The reprimand carries no additional punishment other than the public scrutiny, said Jim Drennan, professor at the University of North Carolina's Institute of Government. The N.C. State Bar could take up the matter separately.

Doyle said that the judge's reprimand was "distressing." She said her office has instituted a new policy requiring that all evidence turned in to prosecutors must be logged and time-stamped.

But the judge said the slip put a tremendous strain on the court and threatened the defendant's rights.

"This conduct placed this Court in a position of having to balance out the competing considerations of the Defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial and the nature of the pending charge," he wrote.

Judge Johnson said that West's family also had a right to get this trial going. Denning said his client, who maintains her innocence, is eager to get the trial started and learn her fate.