Opinion ID: 2055469
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the relatedness in purpose of the act

Text: The Appellate Division recognized that appropriate compliance with the single object rule will not obviate difficult voter choices, for example as among the purpose of a debt, the means to accomplish the purpose, and its cost. And this is obviously and practically so. A comprehensive highway development bond issue covering all counties in the State might face a strong and universal public reaction that County X, highly favored in past years, should not participate. Or a conservation bond issue, it might be thought, should confine itself to the wetlands, rather than include the forests, and so on. Yet this difficulty of choice would project no constitutional infirmity, given the general object of the Act and that such diverse effects were germane to it. The constitutional purpose is to protect against the extreme, the pernicious, the incongruous, Johnson v. Harrison, 47 Minn. 475, 50 N.W. 923, 924 (Sup. Ct. 1894); Newark v. Mount Pleasant Cemetery Co., 58 N.J.L. 168, 171 (E. & A. 1895); the manifestly repugnant, Behnke, supra, 13 N.J. at 25; the palpable contravention of the constitutional command, Jersey City v. Martin, 126 N.J.L. 353, 363 (E. & A. 1941); Public Serv. Elec. & Gas Co. v. Camden, 118 N.J.L. 245, 250 (Sup. Ct. 1937); fraud or overreaching or misleading of the people, Howard Sav. Inst. v. Kielb, 38 N.J. 186, 201 (1976); the inadvertent, Gellert v. State, 522 P. 2d 1120, 1122 (Alaska Sup. Ct. 1974); the discordant, Schwab v. Ariyoshi, 58 Haw. 25, 564 P. 2d 135, 140 (1977); or the intermixing in one and the same act [of] such things as have no proper relation to each other, Grover v. Trustees of Ocean Grove Camp-Meeting Association, 45 N.J.L. 399, 402 (Sup. Ct. 1833); or matters which are uncertain, misleading or deceptive, State v. Czarnicki, 124 N.J.L. 43, 45 (Sup. Ct. 1940). In measuring the relatedness concept against the background of such extremes, we note that the course of judicial and constitutional history in New Jersey has been to invoke a broad rather than a strict or hyper-technical approach. As for specific constitutional adjurations such as involved herein, the judicial policy has been to construe them liberally with a design not to embarrass legislative enactments by an interpretation whose strictness is unnecessary to the accomplishment of the beneficial purposes of the constitutional provision, Bergen County Sav. Bank v. Township of Union, 44 N.J.L. 599, 602 (Sup. Ct. 1882); hypercritical analysis being utterly out of place   . Public Serv. Elec. & Gas Co. v. Camden, supra, 118 N.J.L. at 251; see Howard Sav. Inst. v. Kielb, supra, 38 N.J. at 201. This in deference to the legislative will and that of the people, so that government and its progress in service to the people would not be hamstrung. See Bergen County Sav. Bank v. Township of Union, supra, 44 N.J.L. at 603; Albright v. Sussex County Lake & Park Comm'n, 68 N.J.L. 523, 527-28 (Sup. Ct. 1902); State ex rel. Test v. Steinwedel, 203 Ind. 457, 180 N.E. 865, 868 (1932); Board of County Comm'rs v. White, 79 Wyo. 420, 335 P. 2d 433, 441 (1959). In that regard we do not view as irrelevant, as did the court below, the course of legislative practice utilized in presenting bond issue questions to the people. This historical method, even though unchallenged by litigation, is not without significance, particularly where the practice antedated the 1947 Constitution, which incorporated verbatim the single object provisions of the 1844 Constitution. [2] One may particularly notice a bond issue presented to and approved by the people in 1930, L. 1930, c. 227, in which the projected uses for the bond yield were    the construction, reconstruction, development, extension and equipment of State charitable, hospital, relief, training, correctional, reformatory and penal institutions and the appurtenances thereto   . Id. § 1; see also L. 1921, c. 201. And in the intervening decades many other bond issue questions have been presented to the people  some approved, some rejected, but few exceeding the specificity and relatedness of purposes of the present Act. [3] The grouping of related projects in one statute, therefore, has become an established pattern, one apparently compatible with popular understanding and will, and legislative acceptance. We do not agree that this represents a [l]ong-term adherence to an impermissible mode of legislation, 164 N.J. Super. at 126, but rather is entitled to weight in analysis of the manner of application of the constitutional command. Like all precedents, where contemporaneous and practical interpretation has stood unchallenged for a considerable length of time it will be regarded as of great importance in arriving at the proper construction of a statute. 2A Sutherland, Statutes & Statutory Construction § 49.07, 251-52 (4th ed. 1973). See State v. Clark, 15 N.J. 334, 340-41 (1954); Commonwealth Roofing Co. v. Riccio, 81 N.J. Eq. 486, 488-89 (E. & A. 1913); Francis v. Southern Pacific Co., 333 U.S. 445, 450, 68 S.Ct. 611, 613-14, 92 L.Ed. 798, 804 (1948); Fleming v. Mohawk Wrecking & Lumber Co., 331 U.S. 111, 116, 67 S.Ct. 1129, 1132, 91 L.Ed. 1375, 1382 (1947); United States v. State Bank of North Carolina, 31 U.S. (6 Pet. ) 29, 39-40, 8 L.Ed. 308, 312 (1832). This doctrine has such prevalence that it is applicable not only in the exposition of statutes, but in the interpretation of constitutions of governments. In re Hudson County, 106 N.J.L. 62, 75 (E. & A. 1928). The spirit of breadth, tolerance and flexibility in application of a constitutional mandate such as here involved is well stated in the early case of Johnson v. Harrison, supra :    All that is required is that the act should not include legislation so incongruous that it could not, by any fair intendment, be considered germane to one general subject. The subject may be as comprehensive as the legislature chooses to make it, provided it constitutes, in the constitutional sense, a single subject, and not several. The connection or relationship of several matters, such as will render them germane to one subject and to each other, can be of various kinds, as, for example, of means to ends, of different subdivisions of the same subject, or that all are designed for the same purpose, or that both are designated by the same term. Neither is it necessary that the connection or relationship should be logical; it is enough that the matters are connected with and related to a single subject, in popular signification. [50 N.W. at 924]. We thus consider whether by any fair intendment the purposes to be served by the present bond issue are, as contended by the Association, essentially unrelated to each other, or related only at a prohibited level of abstraction, a proposition accepted by the court below. That court thought them unrelated measures, disparate objects or works, improvidently combined provisions, leaving only as the proffered basis for relating the several purposes of this enactment    the fact that `buildings' will be constructed from the proceeds of the bonds. This conclusion led to its emphatic and unconditional finding of manifest and fatal repugnance to the Constitution. 164 N.J. Super. at 127. We disagree. We perceive a sure relatedness among the institutional construction of the buildings, the purposes such institutions are to serve, and the identity of those who will be served thereby (primarily those who in custody or other circumstances are linked together by their need for State care, protection and rehabilitation [4] ), providing, from the practical and sensible standpoint recommended by our precedents the requisite germaneness inter se, all in fulfillment of the general object of the law. Regrettably, a large segment of our citizenry must, as in every jurisdiction, be incarcerated, not only for punishment for crime but for incapacitation, for the protection of the peaceful community  for the domestic tranquility envisaged by our forebears. Yet under the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, these prisoners may not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, a prospect to be almost certainly anticipated absent the effectuation of one of the purposes of the bond issue. Again, no decent state or its people will confine its mentally disabled or retarded citizens in a dilapidated physical plant, or subject these unfortunate fellow humans to more hardships than they already suffer from an unhappy fate. By the same token, neither Legislature nor the people would deny to the sightless and handicapped the library facilities to be provided by the issue. The State purpose in this direction was long ago decided when it created our Commission for the Blind and Visually Handicapped, N.J.S.A. 30:6-1 et seq., and has been confirmed in other ways, including among them the approval of the instant bond issue by the people in the general election of 1978. Nor is the smallest remnant of the bond issue, for the construction of a forensic science laboratory for the activities of the State Medical Examiner ( N.J.S.A. 52:17B-78 et seq. ), disassociated with the well-being and protection of many in our population, as testified to before the legislative committee by the Examiner, Dr. Edwin Albano, inter alia, as follows: Now, the lack of space discourages many areas of possible research in the etiology  the cause  and solution of epidemiological factors  that is the ecology  associated with disease and sudden death, such as crib death, even cancer deaths   . [Public Hearing, Assembly Institutions, Health and Welfare Committee, June 22, 1978, at 2-3]. The interconnection of the Medical Examiner's responsibilities and the institutional, as well as the general, population is evident, e.g., his statutory duty to investigate deaths of prisoners or others in the institutions to be assisted by this bond issue. N.J.S.A. 52:17B-86 e, f. We see in all the foregoing purposes and the substantial segments of our population to be served thereby, and in the beneficent State resolve and commitment to them (the meeting of public responsibilities to the people of this State, 164 N.J. Super. at 119), a relatedness fully meeting the constitutional norm. That being so there appears to us no constitutional imperative to strike down the determination of the Legislature and the expressed will of the people.