Source: http://www.pavlacklawfirm.com/blog/what-happens-when-part-of-an-indiana-statute-is-unconstitutional
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 02:41:12+00:00

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After last week’s flurry of notable civil decisions from Indiana’s appellate courts, this week was fairly quiet. An interesting footnote to Indiana legal history was added as the Court of Appeals of Indiana for the first time handed down a decision in a direct appeal from the Marion County Small Claims Court. That is notable because, since the enactment of Indiana small claims procedures, appeals of small claims decisions in all but one county progressed like any other appeal. That one county was Marion County (Indianapolis), which preserved township-based courts and required appeal to the county superior courts for trial de novo. A recent amendment to the statutes governing Marion County small claims has now made appeals direct.
Considerably more noteworthy, however, was the Indiana Supreme Court’s ruling in City of Hammond v. Herman & Kittle Properties, Inc., which held that an Indiana statute exempting two cities from the $5 cap on municipalities charging rental-registration fees was an unconstitutional special law. The important point of the decision is not the specific law at issue. Instead, the key legal analysis was whether the statute must be struck down in full, allowing all municipalities to charge fees above the $5 cap, or just the exemption must be struck down, leaving in place the cap and applying it to all municipalities. The Indiana Supreme Court determined that the offending provision was severable, meaning that just the offending provision could be excised.
The Indiana Court of Appeals, like the Indiana Supreme Court, found the statute was unconstitutional. The key to the court of appeals’ decision was that the statute did not contain a severability clause. Adhering to the Indiana Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in Indiana Educ. Employment Relations Board v. Benton Community School Corporation, the court of appeals found that the absence of a severability clause creates the presumption that the statute is not severable.
(2) the remainder is incomplete and incapable of being executed in accordance with the legislative intent without the invalid provision or application.
The important takeaway, then, is that Benton Community has been supplanted by a statute that places a strong preference in favor of keeping intact all statutes that can be preserved despite unconstitutional provisions.
City of Hammond v. Herman & Kittle Props., Inc., ---N.E.3d---, No. 19S-PL-148 (Ind. 2019) (Rush, C.J.).
City of Hammond v. Herman & Kittle Props., Inc., 95 N.E.3d 116, 119 (Ind. Ct. App. 2018) (Robb, J.), trans. granted and opinion vacated.
Ind. Educ. Emp’t Relations Bd. v. Benton Cmty. Sch. Corp., 266 Ind. 491, 494, 365 N.E.2d 752, 753 (1977) (Prentice, J.).
Polk-King v. Discover Bank, ---N.E.3d---, 2019 Ind. App. LEXIS 114 (Ind. Ct. App. Mar. 14, 2019) (Altice, J.).

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