Opinion ID: 2623059
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the shondel/batchelder dilemma

Text: ¶ 10 The notion that a prosecutor may be empowered to charge two people who have engaged in the same conduct with different crimes carrying different penalties is one that offends our sense of fairness. We have also found it to violate the guarantees of equal protection of the law enshrined in the United States Constitution. E.g., State v. Shondel, 22 Utah 2d 343, 453 P.2d 146, 147 (1969). We have characterized what has come to be known as the Shondel doctrine this way: Equal protection of the law guarantees like treatment of all those who are similarly situated. Accordingly, the criminal laws must be written so that . . . the exact same conduct is not subject to different penalties depending upon which of two statutory sections a prosecutor chooses to charge. State v. Bryan, 709 P.2d 257, 263 (Utah 1985). That this core holding of Shondel would come to claim the title of a doctrine is emblematic of its durability and perceived significance. Having bestowed on Shondel the status of doctrine, it would seem that we have an obligation to explain our potentially contrary statement that [t]he mere fact that one criminal episode may arguably violate several criminal statutes, thus giving the prosecutor discretion to choose which of the violations to prosecute, does not deny the accused equal protection of the laws under the federal constitution unless the prosecutor can be shown to have impermissibly discriminated against a particular class of defendants. State v. Tuttle, 780 P.2d 1203, 1215 (Utah 1989) (citing United States v. Batchelder, 442 U.S. 114, 124-25, 99 S.Ct. 2198, 60 L.Ed.2d 755 (1979)). ¶ 11 Perhaps the law can tolerate simultaneous commitments to fending off unfettered prosecutorial license when deciding which of two crimes with identical elements but different penalties to charge and to permit the exercise of that very prosecutorial license so long as the charging decision is not discriminatory. Until now, we have been content to honor both the Shondel doctrine and the teaching of Tuttle without acknowledging their differences. This might not be of concern if they offered different solutions to different problems, but they do not. Instead, they present two discrete and contradictory ways to solve the same legal problem. That problem exists because the efforts of legislatures to define criminal conduct and to prescribe the sanctions for those crimes have yielded laws that overlap one another and provide disparate penalties for the same offenses. ¶ 12 There is nothing inherently wrong with criminal laws that overlap. Indeed, overlapping criminal laws typically advance legitimate and wholly defensible objectives. No one would take issue, for example, with the legislative decision to make both murder and felony murder crimes, despite the fact that they overlap in their elements and expose those convicted of them to different penalties. A legislature is clearly justified when it determines that taking the life of another in the course of committing an additional and distinct criminal act is more reprehensible and worthy of more severe sanction than murder committed under other circumstances. At the same time, the enforcement of criminal laws with overlapping elements or with disparate penalties for identical conduct is limited by fundamental constitutional guarantees, most notably the guarantees against double jeopardy and of equal protection of the laws. The manner by which these constitutional guarantees have come to limit the operation and application of overlapping criminal laws is through the merger doctrine, the Shondel doctrine, and the approach announced by the United States Supreme Court in Batchelder and adopted by this court in Tuttle. Because each of these doctrines and approaches owes its existence to the statutory circumstance at issue herethe effect of overlapping criminal lawsit is useful to our discussion to summarize the content of each of these devices. ¶ 13 The merger doctrine derives from the constitutional guarantee that a person may not be held accountable twice for the same criminal conduct. State v. Ross, 2007 UT 89, ¶ 63, 174 P.3d 628; see U.S. Const. amend. V. The Legislature codified the merger doctrine in statute, providing that [a] defendant may be convicted of an offense included in the offense charged but may not be convicted of both the offense charged and the included offense. Utah Code Ann. § 76-1-402(3) (2003). We conduct a merger analysis by comparing the statutory elements ' of the two crimes as a theoretical matter, and, where necessary, by reference to the facts proved at trial. State v. Hill, 674 P.2d 96, 97 (Utah 1983). ¶ 14 Both Shondel and Batchelder responded to equal protection challenges to overlapping criminal statutes. Of the analytic approaches announced in both cases, neither shares the merger model's use of both the elements of the relevant statutes and the defendant's affairs to conduct its assessment. The Shondel doctrine limits its inquiry to the elements of the criminal statutes which the defendant claims overlap and applies only when two statutes are wholly duplicative as to the elements of the crime. Bryan, 709 P.2d at 263. Unlike the merger doctrine, the Shondel doctrine treats as irrelevant the conduct of a particular defendant; only the content of the statutes matters. Conversely, the approach relied on by the United States Supreme Court in Batchelder limits its consideration of the statutes at issue to a more familiar equal protection analysis. 442 U.S. at 124-25 & n. 9, 99 S.Ct. 2198. In Batchelder, for example, the Court looked to whether the prosecutorial choice to pursue a conviction under one statute instead of anotherMr. Batchelder was convicted and sentenced to the maximum of five years in prison under one statute that prohibited felons from possessing firearms, while another seemingly identical statute limited the penalty to two years of imprisonmentresulted in selective enforcement using unconstitutional classification criteria like race or religion. Id. ¶ 15 The Shondel doctrine, then, presumes that unfettered prosecutorial discretion to charge under two statutes with identical elements but different penalties violates the guarantee of equal protection under the law. Thus, a reviewing court need only examine the statutes that are claimed to give rise to the prosecutor's discretion. Batchelder, by contrast, finds unfettered prosecutorial discretion to choose among similar statutes with disparate penalties benign unless the discretion was exercised in an unconstitutional manner. ¶ 16 If any doubt existed that the contradictions between the Shondel doctrine and Batchelder cannot be sidestepped with the rationale that they address different legal issues, that doubt should be put to rest after examining two cases handed down within six months of each other, one by this court and the other by the Wyoming Supreme Court, that confronted equal protection challenges to the felony murder and child abuse homicide statutes of the respective states. In State v. Fedorowicz, 2002 UT 67, 52 P.3d 1194, we declined to apply the Shondel doctrine to. Mr. Fedorowicz's claim that the trial court erred in instructing the jury with respect to both felony murder, a first degree felony, and child abuse homicide, a third degree felony, instead of just the lesser charge. The exercise required an exquisitely detailed dissection of the plain language of the two statutes to determine whether the crime of felony murder contained a single element that would sufficiently distinguish it from the crime of child abuse homicide. Our efforts yielded a distinction that we found to be adequate to keep the two statutes from being wholly duplicative. Id. ¶ 58, 453 P.2d 146. Felony murder predicated on child abuse required the victim to have sustained serious physical injury, while child abuse homicide required the victim to have suffered only physical injury. Id. ¶ 55, 453 P.2d 146. The legislative inclusion of serious was enough, in our view, to make the two crimes completely dissimilar and to secure the constitutionality of Mr. Fedorowicz's felony murder conviction. Id. ¶ 17 We need not question the correctness of the result in Fedorowicz to admit that the Shondel doctrine forced us to be more strenuous in our parsing of relevant statutes than we would have preferred. It likely overstates the case to label as completely dissimilar a distinction between serious physical injury and physical injury in the statutory formulation of two crimes in which the person upon whom the injury, serious or otherwise, is inflicted dies. We saw these exertions through to the end, however, because the Shondel doctrine demanded it. The result our efforts yielded, though defensible, was not particularly satisfying. ¶ 18 When the Wyoming Supreme Court was faced with an equal protection challenge to its felony murder and child abuse statutes, the court used the Batchelder analytical model instead. Johnson v. State, 2003 WY 9, ¶ ¶ 26-33, 61 P.3d 1234 (Wyo.2003). Under the Wyoming child abuse statute then in effect, child abuse included conduct resulting in death. Id. ¶ ¶ 1, 22. The Wyoming statutes paralleled closely the Utah statutes we confronted in Fedorowicz. By following Batchelder, however, the Wyoming court avoided the need to perform the close dissection of statutory language that, based on our experience in Fedorowicz, the Shondel doctrine seemed to require. Instead, the court grounded its holding in the same pronouncement from the Batchelder court which we relied on in Tuttle that `when an act violates more than one criminal statute, the Government may prosecute under either so long as it does not discriminate against any class of defendants.' Johnson, 2003 WY 9, 1128, 61 P.3d 1234 (quoting Batchelder, 442 U.S. at 124, 99 S.Ct. 2198).