Opinion ID: 1902104
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Validity of ISP as Applied to First- and Second-Degree Offenders

Text: The challenge to ISP, according to both the State, represented by the prosecutor, and the Attorney General as amicus, relates only to its application to first- and second-degree crimes. In particular there is no challenge to the Court's power to provide such a Program as a sentence-modification mechanism, nor any direct challenge to the Court's power to foreclose appeals from modification of sentences other than for first- and second-degree crimes, although some of the arguments made by the State could apply to that Rule provision. We shall therefore limit the issue as framed by the parties: the validity of ISP and the Rules implementing it only as applied to first- and second-degree offenders. Resolution of the challenge requires identifying the source of the Court's power to adopt ISP and the source of the Legislature's power to adopt N.J.S.A. 2C:44-1d and 1(f)2, allegedly in conflict with ISP. Since we have concluded, see section V, infra at 565-571, 608 A. 2d at 350-353, that the Program and the statute are in conflict, we must decide which prevails. We will first examine the source of the judiciary's power. The judiciary does not determine the punishment for crimes. That is up to the Legislature. See, e.g., State v. Tate, 102 N.J. 64, 69, 505 A. 2d 941 (1986). There is no law, no constitutional provision, that explicitly so provides, it is simply one of the most basic understandings of the allocation of governmental powers among the three branches. The Legislature and the Executive do not decide cases  even though the Constitution does not say so; the judiciary does not pass laws. One of the categories of legislation that the judiciary has no power to adopt is that defining crimes and providing for their punishment. If this Court adopted a rule purporting to make it a crime to drive a car on Sundays, that rule would be beyond our power; and if we said that the crime of theft by deception involving more than $75,000 ( N.J.S.A. 2C:20-4 and 20-2b(1)(a)) was a crime of the fourth degree instead of a crime of the second-degree as provided for by the Legislature, that too would be beyond our power. Although the simplicity of the examples may conceal potential complexities, they tell what the true issue of this case is: who controls punishment  the Legislature or the Court. There is no doubt about the answer. The questions that are raised arise from the efforts of all branches  including the judiciary  to cope with increasing crime, overcrowded prisons, the cost of incarceration, crowded court calendars, and the rehabilitation of offenders, and to do so creatively. These efforts are reflected initially in the melange of punishments  dispositions  explicitly made available to the sentencing court by the Legislature in the Code of Criminal Justice. N.J.S.A. 2C:43-2. In addition to imprisonment pursuant to that Code, the court may sentence the offender to pay a fine or make restitution, may place the offender on probation including imprisonment for a term not to exceed 364 days as a condition thereof, or some combination of these punishments. Ibid. The court may also release the offender under supervision in the community or require performance of community-related service, sentence the offender to a half-way house or other residential facility in the community, or to imprisonment at night or on weekends with liberty to work or to participate in training or educational programs. Ibid. The judiciary's concern with the adequacy of the criminal justice system's ability to deal with offenders was reflected in our adoption of Pretrial Intervention (PTI), without legislative authorization, long before the Criminal Code became effective. See Pressler, Current N.J. Court Rules, R. 3:28 Note at 682 (1992). That program, diverting accused offenders from prosecution into programs similar to ISP, but not nearly as restrictive, was later adopted by the Legislature in the Code. See N.J.S.A. 2C:43-12 and -13. While strictly speaking PTI is not a judicial intrusion into the punishment power of the Legislature, since it inevitably admits applicants into the program prior to sentencing, it clearly and substantially affected the disposition of alleged offenders without explicit legislative authority. When constitutionally challenged, PTI was defended, successfully, as an assertion of the judiciary's power over practice and procedure, the challenge in that case based on the assertion that the judiciary had improperly invaded the prerogatives of the Executive branch, in particular the prerogatives of prosecutors to either pursue or abandon prosecution. See State v. Leonardis, 73 N.J. 360, 374, 375 A. 2d 607 (1977) ( Leonardis II); State v. Leonardis, 71 N.J. 85, 108-10, 363 A. 2d 321 (1976) ( Leonardis I). The basis for the practice and procedure ruling  a unanimous ruling  was both the overwhelming impact of increasing criminal prosecutions on judicial resources, as well as the traditional judicial power, limited as it might be, to review the actions of prosecutors. Leonardis I, supra, 71 N.J. at 93-98, 363 A. 2d 321. The justification included the observation that the program, in effect, added to the options available to prosecutors. Of some importance was our recognition that to the extent there was a goal involved in PTI of rehabilitating offenders, that was clearly a legislative function. Leonardis II, supra, 73 N.J. at 369, 375 A. 2d 607. Today, even with the panoply of dispositions explicitly set forth in the Code, including PTI, judicial innovation still occurs. Combining various legislatively authorized dispositional alternatives, we have a Sheriff's Legal Assistance Program, in which inmates in county jails are given credit for time spent performing various tasks to improve county property, or to do other work for the benefit of the county, the program including those incarcerated by municipal courts and providing a multitude of innovative procedures assuring compliance with the program. [8] The parties do not attack ISP itself as posing any separation-of-powers problem. They presumably deem it authorized by the courts' inherent and historical power to modify a sentence, State v. Des Marets, 92 N.J. 62, 80, 455 A. 2d 1074 (1983), provided the modification itself is legal ( R. 3:21-10) along with the statutory authority to sentence a defendant initially to probation, to release defendant under supervision in the community, and to require defendant to perform community related service. N.J.S.A. 2C:43-2b(2) and (5). But for N.J.S.A. 2C:44-1d, there clearly would be no case, both the Prosecutors' Association and the Attorney General as amicus conceding the Court's underlying power, even if questioning the foreclosure of appeals. The point here, however, is that ISP is without doubt a sentencing disposition, albeit a modification of sentence, not an exercise of our power to make rules governing the administration of justice or of the practice and procedure in the courts. But cf. State v. Abbati, 99 N.J. 418, 433, 493 A. 2d 513 (1985) (in dicta, indicating that ISP falls within Court's administrative powers). It deals with the essence of punishment, it deals with what happens to offenders after they are convicted. It is a sentence, it is punishment. See State v. Clay, 230 N.J. Super. 509, 514, 553 A. 2d 1356 (App.Div. 1989), aff'd o.b., 118 N.J. 251, 571 A. 2d 295 (1990). That it is a modification of sentence makes no difference, for in effect the original sentence is vacated and a new sentence imposed, the new sentence being ISP. See Winter 1992 Progress Report, supra, at 6. Whether based solely on the authorization of statute, or, in absence of any statute and not in conflict therewith, on some notion of inherent judicial power, ISP clearly falls within that area over which the Legislature has close to total power: the power to punish, to deter, to rehabilitate, including the power to restrict any variations on the methods and options available for those purposes. [9] We need not decide the outer limits of that power, including its ability to restrict judicial initiatives like ISP, but certainly at the very least it includes the power to mandate imprisonment for certain crimes, leaving no judicial discretion. See State v. Des Marets, supra, 92 N.J. at 80-81, 455 A. 2d 1074. Having decided that the source of our power to create ISP is based either on statute or is inherent  and not constitutional  and having assumed it conflicts with N.J.S.A. 2C:44-1d, the conclusion is inescapable that as to first- and second-degree offenses, the enactment of ISP exceeds our power since it conflicts with a valid exercise of legislative power to determine the punishment that fits the crime. That N.J.S.A. 2C:44-1d falls squarely within the legislative power is not debated, and seems beyond debate. Presumably, the Legislature could, as it did with the Graves Act, N.J.S.A. 2C:43-6c, and with various laws concerning drugs, e.g., N.J.S.A. 2C:43-6f, mandate imprisonment, without exception, for all first- and second-degree offenders, imprisonment for terms in the case of first-degree offenders between ten and twenty years and for second-degree offenders between five and ten years. But it has in fact imposed just such a mandate with but one exception, when serious injustice would result from such imprisonment. The only relevance to ISP of the exception is the strong inference that having so drastically limited the exception to imprisonment  for our decisions construing the exception have underlined the rarity of its application  the Legislature, at the time it adopted the Code, did not intend to allow a much broader exception in the form of ISP.