Opinion ID: 2621356
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the court of appeals incorrectly interpreted utah's bad check statute as requiring a contemporaneous exchange

Text: ¶34 Finally, we turn away from procedural concerns to the merits of the court of appeals' statutory interpretation. As part of the grant of certiorari, this court agreed to take up the question of whether section 76-6-505 requires a substantially contemporaneous exchange. Our statutory analysis of section 76-6-505, leads us to conclude that one may commit the crime of passing a bad check without engaging in a substantially contemporaneous exchange. ¶35 The statute at issue here is Utah's bad check statute. Utah Code Ann. § 76-6-505 (2003). The provision reads, in relevant part, Any person who issues . . . a check . . . for the. purpose of obtaining from any person . . . any money, property, or other thing of value . . . knowing it will not be paid by the drawee and payment is refused by the drawee, is guilty of issuing a bad check . . . . Id. § 76-6-505(1). ¶36 During the plea colloquy, Mr. Robison emphasized that the truck had been delivered several weeks before he sent Mr. Painter the bad check. The court of appeals seized on this point. It reasoned that because Mr. Robison received the truck before issuing the bad check, he did not issue the check for the. purpose of obtaining anythingthat is, he had already obtained the thing of value. To be unlawful, the passing of the bad check must bear the hallmarks of a quid pro quo for money, property, or some other thing of value. The court of appeals viewed temporal proximity between the passing of the check and the acquisition of value as the essential measure of the check writer's purpose. In the court's view, the elapsed time between the delivery of the truck and the passing of the check was too long to establish the necessary link between the check and the truck. Only a contemporaneous exchange would do. ¶37 The court of appeals' determination that the statute included a contemporaneous exchange requirement was significant because rule 11(e)(4)(A) of the Utah Rules of Criminal Procedure requires that a guilty plea be an admission to all of the elements of the offense to which the plea is entered. By interpreting the statute to require a contemporaneous exchange, the court of appeals determined that Mr. Robison's plea did not include facts sufficient to establish the crime to which he had pleaded guilty. That determination mandated reversal under rule 11. ¶38 In finding that the statute required a substantially contemporaneous exchange, the court of appeals relied upon logic from Howells, Inc. v. Nelson, 565 P.2d 1147, 1149 (Utah 1977). Howells asked whether attorney fees should be awarded to the recipient of a bad check. The defendant had written a dishonored check to pay on a past due account. The plaintiff claimed that attorney fees should be available because the act of passing the check constituted fraud. We rejected this claim because the plaintiff was not induced to give anything of value, nor was it in any way cheated or adversely affected by the giving of the check. Id. We reasoned that payment of an antecedent debt was qualitatively different from a payment made for something of value, like the goods or services that were later subsumed within the indebtedness. ¶39 Our Howells reasoning is inapt here. Instead, our analysis relies on our traditional methods of statutory interpretation. When interpreting statutes, we determine the statute's meaning by first looking to the statute's plain language, and give effect to the plain language unless the language is ambiguous. Blackner v. State, 2002 UT 44, ¶ 12, 48 P.3d 949. The plain language of the statute informs us that the key is the purpose for which the check is issued. If the check is issued in exchange for a thing of value, then the statute applies. The passage of time between the acquisition of the thing of value and the passing of the bad check, while relevant, is not the defining characteristic of purpose. To the contrary, little can be gleaned about the purpose of a bad check from merely knowing whether it was passed five seconds or five weeks after the thing of value changed hands. In short, the purpose for passing a bad check may be established without any evidence regarding when the check was passed relative to when the thing of value to which it is linked was acquired. ¶40 There is no evidence that Mr. Robison passed the checks to Mr. Painter for an antecedent debt. The only evidence is that the checks were passed in payment for the truck. The truck was turned over to Mr. Robison contingent on his customer's approval and the subsequent payment of the purchase price to Mr. Painter. The truck was not exchanged for a debt on which Mr. Robison would make subsequent payments or even a single subsequent paymenteverything in the record suggests that Mr. Painter relinquished ownership of the truck in exchange for the issuance of full payment from Mr. Robison. To interject the additional step of debt creation when no such arrangement was contemplated is nonsensical and defeats the purpose of the statute. The actual transaction, therefore, did not occur when Mr. Robison first drove off in the truck. Rather, it took place when Mr. Robison told Mr. Painter that his customer was indeed going to purchase the truck, at which point there was an understanding that Mr. Robison would pay for the truck. In other words, the transaction was premised on the understanding that a check would issue in exchange for the truck. Whether Mr. Robison wrote out a check and handed it to Mr. Painter at that instant or waited an indefinite period of time and then mailed Mr. Painter a check is irrelevant. Mr. Robison would not have obtained the truck if Mr. Painter had not known or assumed that payment would be made. Consequently, the check was indeed issued for the purpose of obtaining the truck, and the district court's decision was correct.