Opinion ID: 1830790
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Whether Alabama's retirement-tax structure violates the representatives' right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Text: The representatives claim that Alabama's system of retirement-benefit exemptions for public employees violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With regard to the standard we apply when reviewing legislative enactments for such federal equal-protection violations, this Court has stated: In equal protection jurisprudence, any law that does not employ a classification based on race, sex, national origin, or legitimacy of birth and does not impinge upon a fundamental right, is subject to the `rational relationship' analysis. Under this analysis, any law rationally related to a legitimate governmental objective will withstand an equal protection challenge. Ex parte Robertson, 621 So.2d 1289, 1291 (Ala.1993). Stated another way, the rational-relationship analysis acknowledges the right of the State, in circumstances not involving a fundamental right or suspect classification, to utilize its plenary power to make some laws applicable to some of its citizens and not to others: The Equal Protection Clause does not deny the State the power to treat different classes of people in different ways. However, `[t]he classification must not be unrelated to the objective of the statute and must be reasonable, not arbitrary, and must rest upon some ground of difference having a fair and substantial relation to the object of the legislation, so that all persons similarly circumstanced shall be treated alike.' Krupp Oil Co. v. Yeargan, 665 So.2d 920, 926 (Ala.1995) (quoting Tyson v. Johns-Manville Sales Corp., 399 So.2d 263, 271-72 (Ala.1981)). Alabama's retirement-tax structure treats individuals differently, based on their status as either public employees or private employees. Because no fundamental right or suspect classification is involved, a challenge to this system fails to trigger either strict or intermediate scrutiny under current equal-protection jurisprudence. Therefore, to uphold its retirement-tax structure against a challenge under the Fourteenth Amendment, the State need only show that that structure is rationally related to a legitimate governmental objective. With respect to this issue, we conclude that the Court of Civil Appeals properly applied the rational-relationship test described above to all four subclasses. We adopt that court's reasoning as stated in the Equal Protection section of its opinion in Melof v. James, 735 So.2d at 1170.