Opinion ID: 1111406
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: progressive teleologic regression Renfro and Bachman [37]

Text: Six months to the day after Baker, this court handed down its three-to-two split decision in State v. Renfro, 56 Haw. 501, 542 P.2d 366 (1975). [38] The Renfro defendants had been convicted of promoting a detrimental drug in the first degree (a class C felony), in violation of HRS § 712-1247(1)(e), for having knowingly and unlawfully ... possesse[d]... 2.2 pounds or more [of] marijuana. [39] On appeal, they attacked the constitutionality of the statute, inter alia, on the grounds that the section exceed[ed] the legitimate police power of the State and violate[d] the constitutional right to privacy. Renfro, 56 Haw. at 502, 542 P.2d at 368. In a majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Richardson and joined by Justices Ogata and Menor, this court affirmed the defendants' convictions. Its relevant analysis consisted of the following: In the recent case of State v. Baker, 56 Haw. 271, 535 P.2d 1394 (1975), this court upheld the constitutionality of section 1249 of the Penal Code.... ... [T]he holding in Baker is immediately dispositive of two arguments raised by [the defendants], namely, the claims that a proscription of the possession of marijuana exceeds the State's police power and that such a proscription violates the right of privacy. We held in Baker that criminalization of the possession of marijuana is within the legislature's police power. We reasoned that recent scientific studies questioning the harmfulness of marijuana have not sufficiently rebutted the presumption of constitutionality attaching to the legislature's proscription. 56 Haw. at 276-78, 535 P.2d at 1397-98. The scientific studies of marijuana are still too inconclusive to compel the conclusion that the legislature has acted arbitrarily or irrationally in treating marijuana as a substantial danger to society. Baker also held that the constitutional right of privacy does not prevent the legislature from proscribing the possession of marijuana for private use. The court noted that neither the federal nor Hawaii constitutions has elevated the right of privacy to the equivalent of a first amendment right. [40] Therefore, in the face of the presumptively rational legislative finding that marijuana poses a serious harm to society, the right of privacy must give way. .... We agree both with the holding in State v. Kantner, supra , that ... there is no fundamental guarantee protecting the use and possession of euphoric drugs (53 Haw. at 333, 493 P.2d at 310) and with the analogous holding in State v. Baker, supra , that the particular right-of-privacy values attaching to the possession of marijuana for personal use are not in themselves fundamental constitutional rights comparable to the rights guaranteed by the first amendment (56 Haw. at 280-83, 535 P.2d at 1399-1401). Therefore we apply the rational basis test in this case, rather than a strict scrutiny or compelling state interest standard of review. ... We holdat least for the present while scientific knowledge about marijuana remains incompletethat it is not irrational for the legislature to regard marijuana as threatening a degree of harm substantial enough to warrant imposition of ordinary criminal sanctions, including imprisonment, for the possession of marijuana. Renfro, 56 Haw. at 502-03, 505 n. 9, 506, 542 P.2d at 368-70 & n. 9 (some ellipsis points in original and some added) (footnotes omitted). What is particularly striking about the majority opinion in Renfro is its mantraesque, rote quality. Although the constitutional constraintsestablished in Kraft and Lee  on the state's police power were acknowledged in theory, they seem essentially to have atrophied to a null set. Indeed, the Renfro majority opinion virtually turns the Kraft/Lee analysis on its head. Gone was the proposition, from which we start, that where an individual's conduct, or class of individuals' conduct, does not directly harm others[,] the public interest is not affected and is not properly the subject of the police power of the legislature. Lee, 51 Haw. at 521, 465 P.2d at 577. And in the face of a legislative determination that the conduct of a particular class of people recklessly affects their physical well-being and that the consequent physical injury and death is so widespread as to be of grave concern to the public, id., not only was it no longer required, as a precondition of the state's exercise of the police power, that the incidence and severity of the physical harm [be] statistically demonstrated to the satisfaction of the court, id. (emphasis added), but the diametric opposite seemed to have become the case: if the incidence and severity of the physical harm was inconclusive, see Renfro, 56 Haw. at 503, 542 P.2d at 368, and the state of scientific knowledge was incomplete, see id. at 506, 542 P.2d at 370, then the legislature could exercise the police power in whatever way it wanted. In short, the Renfro majority seemed to have completely forgotten the direct harm to others/statistically demonstrated secondary social harm circumscription of the constitutional exercise the state's police power so carefully explicated in Kraft and Lee. That being so, it is little wonder that the Renfro majority regarded the constitutional right of privacyif it really believed there was one at all, having never found an instance in which it took precedence over anything elseas being of such minor, non-fundamental importance that individual privacy was invariably obliged to give way, see Renfro, 56 Haw. at 503, 542 P.2d at 369, to legislative whim and speculation. Justice Kobayashi, having written himself blue in the face in Kantner and Baker, contented himself with a one-sentence dissent: I dissent for the reasons stated in my dissent in State v. Baker, 56 Haw. 271, 535 P.2d 1394 (1975). Renfro, 56 Haw. at 507, 542 P.2d at 370 (Kobayashi, J., dissenting). Significantly, however, Justice Kobayashi's reasoning in Baker had apparently persuaded Circuit Court Judge Sodetani, who therefore joined in the Renfro dissent. See supra note 38. Accordingly, as in Kantner, the Hawai`i marijuana possession laws escaped constitutional oblivion by a single vote. On December 29, 1978, Justice Kobayashithe last of the  Kantner trioretired from this court. Three months later, on February 28, 1979, Justice Kidwell (who had replaced Justice Levinson, see supra note 24) did likewise. It was under these conditions, on May 21, 1979, that a unanimous Hawai`i Supreme Courtconsisting of Chief Justice Richardson, Justices Ogata and Menor, Retired Justice Marumoto (who, seven years earlier, had joined the plurality opinion in Kantner ), and Circuit Court Judge Kato handed down a per curiam opinion in State v. Bachman, 61 Haw. 71, 595 P.2d 287 (1979). [41] Like Mallan and the Baker defendants (and, pursuant to the predecessor statute, the Kantner defendants before them), Bachman was convicted of the knowing possession of marijuana in any amount, in violation of HRS § 712-1249(1). See supra note 2. And like Mallan and the defendants in Baker and Kantner, Bachman, among other things, assert[ed] the unconstitutionality of the statute. Bachman, 61 Haw. at 72, 595 P.2d at 287. Not surprisingly, with Justices Abe, Levinson, and Kobayashi gone from the scene and Judge Sodetani safely relegated to his circuit court bench, this court wasn't giving an inch. So it was that this court dispatched Bachman's constitutional claim with the following pithy analysis: We find [Bachman's] contention to be without merit. What we said in State v. Baker, 56 Haw. 271, 535 P.2d 1394 (1975), and State v. Renfro, 56 Haw. 501, 542 P.2d 366 (1975), is still determinative of this issue. Id. at 72, 595 P.2d at 287-88 (footnote omitted). To all intents and purposesand with Kraft, Lee, Cotton, and Kantner still intact but as if they had never been written (that is, as if they were unprecedents), the state's police power was now perceived as boundless and the penumbral, fundamental constitutional right to liberty/personal autonomy/privacy all but moribund. Then came the results of the 1978 Constitutional Convention and, with it, the rekindling of the flame.