Opinion ID: 1134697
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: The Court's Opinion, in Conjunction with Hazelwood, Vastly Expands the State's Power to Forfeit Property.

Text: Looking beyond this case, I find most disturbing the conjunction of today's curtailment of Baker with last year's approval, in State v. Hazelwood , [65] of criminal punishment based on simple negligence. Hazelwood and today's opinion jointly free the State from the burdensome restraints of criminal procedural rights, while leaving it free to use criminal enforcement mechanisms, if it only lowers the mens rea requirement for, and quasi-criminalizes, an offense. It can then use criminal law tools to control behavior and raise revenue by convincing judges to forfeit citizens' property, of potentially unlimited value, with a showing only of simple negligence, or even strict liability, and without having to face the expense, delay, and moderating influence of a jury. The consequences are impressive. In any area of law enforcement in which the legislature wishes to aid prosecutors, and perhaps raise revenues, it can create parallel quasi-criminal violations for existing crimes. This shifts from defendants to prosecutors the decision whether a case will be tried to a jury. Perhaps more importantly, it tremendously shifts settlement bargaining power to prosecutors. With no jury to stand between the prosecutor and the defendant, and with the leverage prosecutors should gain by the increased bargaining power inherent in prosecuting quasi-criminal cases, justice surely will not be delayed. It will only be denied. IV. Conclusion The court gives itself away at the outset of its opinion when it says that strict liability commercial fishing violations are minor offenses which do not fall within established standards for determining whether a criminal jury trial is required. Cases prosecuting such violations are nonetheless criminal rather than civil in nature; therefore a civil jury trial is not required. [66] I doubt that it will be of much comfort to the defendant found guilty by a judge of his or her third strict liability commercial fishing violation[ ], and upon that conviction fined $9,000 and unburdened of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fish caught in the commission of the violation, to be able to say I am not a criminal. I know this to be true because I did not have the right to be tried by a jury. I am only a `quasi-criminal'. A quasi-criminal by any other name is a criminal. Will the citizen on the street begin to understand the difference between a criminal and a quasi-criminal? Will the guilt associated with the conviction of such a violation, heretofore a crime, not be a gauge of the ethical and social judgments of the community? Are we prepared to proclaim, without fear of looking foolish, that such a violation is a relatively innocuous offense[ ] [such as] wrongful parking of motor vehicles, minor traffic violations, and violations which relate to the regulation of property, sanitation, building codes, fire codes, and other legal measures which can be regulatory rather than criminal in their thrust? If so, we must be prepared to approve denial of a jury in a proceeding seeking the forfeiture of a $10,000-$100,000 automobile for a $10 parking ticket or for a driver's failure to activate a turn signal. The court declines to address the circularity of its analysis: the fish you have forfeited were taken as a result of your illegal activity; thus forfeiting them is not punitive. Since the forfeiture of illegally taken fish is not punitive, we need not afford you the right to a jury to determine whether you took the fish illegally. Its parsing of Baker undermines the principles which Baker eloquently articulated. And its failure to recognize that it is sanctioning a new category of cases will result in undermining the constitutional guarantees to trial by jury that heretofore had been presumed to have substance.