Opinion ID: 2612481
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: what we have here and why i worry!

Text: The majority opinion can be breathtaking at times in the display of its scholastic strength. It is, however, an excellent answer to the wrong question. The question is not whether our state's separation of powers doctrine collides with a deferred prosecution scheme, but whether that doctrine prohibits prosecutorial participation during the sentencing process as provided by W.S. 7-13-301. The majority reforms the question to ask if sentencing is an exclusive judicial function and answers that question with a no. I would answer that question with a yes. Because the majority answers that question with a no, they make room on the bench for the prosecutor to participate effectively in sentencing. The judicial processes of Wyoming law have infrequently, if ever, been compelled by majority authorship to grasp so extensively in an effort to justify a societally unproductive and judicially untenable legal position. Paraphrasing from a current admonition against achieving a result without actual precedential justification, the majority reach[es] out peripherally in [] many directions in an attempt to authoritatively support an [unjustified decision]. The reader is inundated with a multitude of citations and a bulk of material running the gambit of quotations from historically well-known United States Supreme Court Justices and legal scholars to justify a result which is only useful to multiply numbers of Wyoming felony convictions. City of Rocky River v. State Employment Relations Bd., 43 Ohio St.3d 1, 539 N.E.2d 103, 120 (1989), Justice Holmes dissenting. If these consolidated appeals challenge prosecutorial discretion under W.S. 7-13-301 [2] to defer criminal prosecutions, then there is no separation of powers problem and the statute in question may be considered constitutionally valid. But if these consolidated appeals challenge a legislative scheme to allow the prosecutor control over the sentencing process, then a collision with our state's separation of powers doctrine appears unavoidable. I understand W.S. 7-13-301 to collide with our separation of powers doctrine since it allows the prosecutor, against the wishes of the trial judge and the defendant, to control the disposition of a case after the accused has been found guilty. I would hold that once a defendant pleads guilty or is convicted by the jury, the role of the prosecutor has come to an end. The majority disagrees and claims the role of the prosecutor remains active until the sentencing judgment is entered, but argues as if binding precedent drives their holding. Actually, existent legal rules have nothing to do with the achieved outcome. The cluster of federal cases advanced by the majority is no logical justification for re-authoring Wyoming law. Where the federal supremacy clause does not operate, Wyoming case law is the appropriate precedent and Wyoming precedent is dispositive. `When the decision to prosecute has been made, the process which leads to acquittal or to sentencing is fundamentally judicial in nature.' Petition of Padget, 678 P.2d 870, 872 (Wyo. 1984) (quoting People v. Tenorio, 3 Cal.3d 89, 94, 89 Cal. Rptr. 249, 252, 473 P.2d 993, 996 (1970)). The majority now hands control over sentencing to the prosecutor when only two years ago we affirmed that [t]o require the court to accept the recommendation of the prosecution as a matter of law would transfer the sentencing duty from the court to the prosecution.    It is the court's duty to impose the sentence, not the prosecution's. Mower v. State, 750 P.2d 679, 681 (Wyo. 1988). Today, the majority turns its back on its duty to guarantee the protection of individual rights and yields to enterprising ambition of a force within or without legislative action to take from the judiciary and give to the executive a power not theirs to give. Not only is the judiciary demeaned, but this holding overall makes no sense unless one examines the unprincipled impact of political theory upon appellate adjudication. Rather than binding precedent, this outcome appears driven by a political theory which tightens the grip of the prosecutor on the throat of the accused at every opportunity. [3] As the jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin has reminded us, several of the constitutional clauses guaranteeing rights to individuals are formulated in such general terms that in many cases judges cannot base their decisions on the text or the intent of the framers. Rather, they must base them, consciously or unconsciously, on a political theory of some kind, a theory that defines in the abstract the proper scope of governmental authority and individual liberty. Elfenbein, The Myth of Conservatism as a Constitutional Philosophy, 71 Iowa L.Rev. 401, 402 (1986). Whatever name is given to the political theory in operation here, it is one which finds primacy in securing legislative supremacy over the rights of citizens unless those rights are enumerated. Such a philosophy does no more than articulate by rote a political theory which selects legislative primacy when the values of majority adaptation in representative government and rights of citizens collide. If `[t]he general principles governing the construction of statutes apply to the construction of constitutions,' County Court Judges Ass'n.v. Sidi, 752 P.2d 960, 973 (Wyo. 1988) (quoting Zancanelli v. Central Coal & Coke Co., 25 Wyo. 511, 173 P. 981, 991 (1918)), and if [w]e construe every word, every clause and every sentence so as to avoid rendering the [constitutional framers' and ratifiers'] actions futile or absurd. Britton v. Bill Anselmi Pontiac-Buick-GMC, Inc., 786 P.2d 855, 864 (Wyo. 1990) (emphasis added), how can we examine our separation of powers doctrine without examining simultaneously the potential impact of legislative enactments on the government's ability to protect the rights of citizens against acts of tyranny by state officials? [4] No analysis is given regarding the possible rights of the accused to be free from prosecutorial participation at this level in the judicial process. The dialogue is couched only in terms of historic prosecutorial power. The crucial operative aspect of rights skepticism is its attitude toward the resolution of [the] systemic tension [between majority rule and individual rights]. When a rights-supporting value of the Constitution is understood to be in arguable conflict with majority conduct, the rights skeptic insists that the case for the recognition of the right be made only under circumstances of textual, historical, or structural certainty; otherwise the majoritarian result must prevail. Under this conception, rights are narrowly defined exceptions to an otherwise prevailing general commitment to majority rule. Elfenbein, supra, 71 Iowa L.Rev. at 425 n. 124 (quoting Sager, Rights, Skepticism and Process-Based Responses, 56 N.Y.U.L.Rev. 417, 441 (1981)). To maintain this skepticism, the majority leaves us with an unfathomable standard to guide our future judgment of when the legislature has violated the separation of powers doctrine. They say that as long as a legislative enactment does not disturb the integration of dispersed powers into a balanced, workable government and can be accommodated by a pragmatic, flexible view of differentiated governmental power, then there is no violation of the separation of powers. Although that is an unfathomable standard, it is a directed pathway to tyranny  ultimate autocracy of government  absolute statism. Incredibly, the majority opens their analysis only after first reforming the claim made by the several defendants. The majority writes that these criminal defendants contend it is essential that we preserve each of the powers in separate, airtight compartments. (Emphasis added.) I do not find in the record or in the briefs where the appellants argue for airtight compartments. The only reference to airtight I have found occurs in a case relied on by the majority which states [t]he [federal] Constitution does not require three airtight departments of government. Geraghty v. United States Parole Com'n, 719 F.2d 1199, 1210 (3rd Cir.1983), cert. denied 465 U.S. 1103, 104 S.Ct. 1602, 80 L.Ed.2d 133 (1984) (emphasis added). The majority takes comfort in Geraghty standing for the proposition that [u]nlike interpreting the constitution or adjudicating disputes, sentencing is not inherently or exclusively a judicial function. Such comfort must be cold comfort because Geraghty, 719 F.2d at 1210 specifically cautioned that its dicta applied to the federal system because [t]he federal Constitution, unlike some state constitutions, has no express provision which prohibits the officials of one branch of government from exercising functions of the other branches. The majority mistakenly seizes upon a single phrase in Geraghty. From that single phrase, they claim that sentencing in Wyoming is not an exclusive judicial function but, political theories being what they can be, everything leading up to the entry of judgment is, of course, an exclusive prosecutorial function. The fundamental character of blending the constitutional separation of powers out of reality serves only to justify unprincipled result-oriented adjudication to suit a contemporary concept of political or economic morality. State ex rel. Whitehead v. Gage, 377 P.2d 299 (Wyo. 1963). That course of governmental conduct was not acceptable to the United States Supreme Court in the steel industry seizure case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 72 S.Ct. 863, 96 L.Ed. 1153 (1952). In that case, it was the executive; but the interest of the constitutional drafters of the United States Constitution was for hopes for freedom to exist in responsibility no less in the judiciary. Our system has not chosen to give separately and singularly to the trial advocate  the prosecutor  the keys to the jail nor power uncontrolled to destroy the effective existence of a human being. The direct and collateral consequences of a felony conviction are, in today's society, beyond rational recognition. Cf. Sibron v. New York, 392 U.S. 40, 88 S.Ct. 1889, 20 L.Ed.2d 917 (1968). We deal here with productive lives and fruitful existence, not just deficits, money and budgets. Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S. 714, 106 S.Ct. 3181, 92 L.Ed.2d 583 (1986). In exercise of constitutional responsibility and determination of guilt as assessed to the judiciary under the stringent [] standard of disinterest as judges, the zealous advocacy of the prosecutors cannot be given priority if the judiciary chooses not to relegate itself to be in authority only a mere mockery. Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils S.A., 481 U.S. 787, 807, 107 S.Ct. 2124, 95 L.Ed.2d 740 (1987). We walked that way once before in impotency. Compare Gage, 377 P.2d 299 with Schaefer v. Thomson, 240 F. Supp. 247 (D.Wyo. 1964). [5] Operating from the comfortable analytic position of only defending against a claim for  air-tight compartments, the majority employs a framer's intent analysis to discover the framers indeed had in mind a pragmatic, flexible view of differentiated governmental power that allows a prosecutor control over the outcome after the accused has pled or been found guilty. Never once, however, does the majority stop to separate intent from purpose. The historic purpose for separating governmental powers is to prevent tyranny. [6] Because the separation of powers doctrine is designed to help prevent governmental tyranny, displays of tyranny by state government employees makes legitimate the question of why our separation of powers model sometimes fails to prevent those displays. By answering the wrong question so well, the majority adds to the potential for tyrannic power which they provided prosecutors in Cooney v. Park County, 792 P.2d 1287 (Wyo. 1990) by declaring that citizens have no civil recourse against any prosecutor, even when the prosecutor willfully uses the awesome power of the state to settle a personal vendetta. In a real sense, it is even more compelling to ask why prosecutorial power is being strengthened in the face of such structural failure [7] . Do we examine a deferred prosecution scheme against the backdrop of our separation of powers doctrine? Or do we examine a legislative scheme to imbed the prosecutor's role into the sentencing process against the backdrop of our separation of powers doctrine? Initially, these consolidated cases present events occurring after the guilty plea or jury verdict was entered. The legislative scheme permits a prosecutor to require the appending of a felony designation to the plea and sentence. This is what these cases involve. The issue addresses whether the separation of powers doctrine is violated by this legislative scheme to strengthen the leverage of prosecutors by allowing prosecutors the discretion to require felony status as a constituent of any sentence. Punishment, confinement, or probationary responsibility is not altered by the prosecutorial veto under the Wyoming adjudicatory structure since the trial court can provide the same sentencing responsibility with or without the application of W.S. 7-13-301 in distinction to W.S. 7-13-302, except that the conviction of a felony is or is not appended. The majority essentially redefines deferred prosecution to include post-plea action of the trial court and hands the reins of the sentencing process to the prosecutor. In addition to nolle prosequi and acquittal, criminal charges may be disposed by three processes. Process one is the diversion programs [8] , process two is a plea or verdict without entry of a felony judgment, and process three is a plea or verdict with entry of a felony judgment. The majority misunderstands or does not recognize the difference between diversion, process one, and plea or verdict without final felony conviction, process two. The plea or verdict which has been entered by probation without felony conviction is no more revocable than is probation with the felony conviction. Zanetti v. State, 783 P.2d 134 (Wyo. 1989); Peper v. State, 768 P.2d 26 (Wyo. 1989); Angerhofer v. State, 758 P.2d 1041 (Wyo. 1988); Chorniak v. State, 715 P.2d 1162 (Wyo. 1986). [9]