Opinion ID: 2612481
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: pending wyoming cases

Text: The dozen cases presently pending in this court to test the uncontrolled discretion granted the prosecutor to deny usage of either segment of the non-felony conviction statute, W.S. 7-13-301, are a composite of our modern society. At issue is not the power of persuasion of the prosecutor; it is an undisciplined use of a veto to foreclose judicial probation sentencing alternatives. Not one of the cases involved a properly defined diversion status since in every case an actual plea was made, justified and accepted except the one county court case where the statute was declared unconstitutional by the county court judge. What the trial court might have done in the individual case in the absence of the veto is not necessarily disclosed in these records. Probably at least in one case, a non-felony conviction structure would have been followed and, probably, in the face of the specific plea bargaining statute and with good reasoning and honest argument by the prosecutor, the felony conviction status would have been adopted by the trial court in at least several of the cases. This would have permitted the exercised discretion of the judiciary to leave further amelioration to the Governor under the constitutional powers of pardon and commutation. Here, the clearly defined issue in every case now pending is the authority of the prosecutor to veto a favorable sentencing alternative without any necessary discretional responsibility or justification and to do this only to insist that a felony conviction results. In not one of these cases was there any semblance of another issue about terms, conditions or probationary aspects of the actual sentence granted which, in all cases, was probation. [23] There is absolutely no case cited by the State or included in the majority opinion that justifies the unsupervised prosecutorial discretion after considering that the diversion cases are not precedentially applicable to the post-guilty plea sentencing cases involved here.