Opinion ID: 487448
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Interpreting State v. Cole

Text: 42 We have found that at the time of Cole's offense Wisconsin law provided that proof of great bodily harm was needed to support a mayhem conviction. It remains to be seen what effect, if any, the court of appeals decision in Cole's case has on the state of the law. 43 The Attorney General reads the State v. Cole opinion as repudiating Kirby and holding that great bodily harm is not an element of mayhem. Cole rejects this thesis as untenable. We agree with Cole for several reasons. 44 First, as mentioned previously, the State v. Cole opinion contains no discussion of Kirby nor even a citation to it. Neither does the opinion so much as mention the phrase great bodily harm. Although the court did note that The trial court gave the pattern instruction, which includes the essential elements of the crime, slip op. at 3-4, we cannot read this isolated and conclusory assertion as overruling Kirby. Not only is the assertion based on a mistaken presumption of the correctness of the pattern instruction but, read in context, it does not appear to be directed at the Kirby great bodily harm question at all. (The remainder of the paragraph in which it appears addresses an entirely separate instructions issue, not raised before this court, concerning the element of intent ). We decline to assume that the Wisconsin Court of Appeals would overrule one of its precedents in so casual and offhand a manner, much less sub silentio. 45 Second, Kirby was a published opinion entitled to statewide precedential effect, Wis.Stats. Sec. 752-41(2), whereas State v. Cole was an unpublished opinion having no precedential value. Wis.Stats. Sec. 809.23(3). Wisconsin lawyers are admonished under pain of possible sanctions not even to cite unpublished opinions. See Tamminen v. Aetna Cas. & Surety Co., 109 Wis.2d 536, 327 N.W.2d 55 (1982). Given the lowly status of unpublished opinions under Wisconsin law, it is inconceivable that State v. Cole was intended to overrule anything. See Wis.Stats. Sec. 809.23(1)(a) (criteria for publication in the official reports ... include whether the opinion ... [e]nunciates a new rule of law or modifies, clarifies or critiques an existing rule.). 46 A third reason for rejecting the Attorney General's expansive interpretation of State v. Cole is that, so read, the decision raises serious due process concerns. In Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347, 84 S.Ct. 1697, 12 L.Ed.2d 894 (1964), the Supreme Court reversed several convictions that rested on an unexpected construction of South Carolina's criminal trespass statute by the state supreme court. Observing that an unforeseeable judicial enlargement of a criminal statute, applied retroactively, operates precisely like an ex post facto law, id. at 353, 84 S.Ct. at 1702, the Court held that a state may not, through judicial interpretation, alter the elements of a crime so as to deny the accused fair warning of the acts prohibited. Id. at 353-54, 84 S.Ct. at 1702-03; see also Douglas v. Buder, 412 U.S. 430, 93 S.Ct. 2199, 37 L.Ed.2d 52 (1973); Rabe v. Washington, 405 U.S. 313, 92 S.Ct. 993, 31 L.Ed.2d 258 (1972); United States ex rel. Reed v. Lane, 759 F.2d 618 (7th Cir.1985), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, ----, 106 S.Ct. 1268, 1282, 89 L.Ed.2d 577, 589 (1986). 47 The Court explored some of the implications of Bouie in Marks v. United States, 430 U.S. 188, 97 S.Ct. 990, 51 L.Ed.2d 260 (1977), a case decided under the fifth amendment's due process clause. Marks held that the test for obscenity announced in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S.Ct. 2607, 37 L.Ed.2d 419 (1973), could not be applied retroactively to persons indicted for conduct occurring under the regime of Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413, 86 S.Ct. 975, 16 L.Ed.2d 1 (1966), previously the leading case on what constituted obscenity. Despite the fact that Miller, not Memoirs, announced the correct first amendment test, Miller's expansion of the accused's potential criminal liability precluded its retroactive application. 430 U.S. at 196, 97 S.Ct. at 995. 48 Marks makes two points pertinent to this case: first, a decision overruling a prior interpretation of a criminal statute is (or at least is ordinarily) unforeseeable under Bouie; and second, the fact that a judicial construction restores the correct understanding of the law is of no consequence in determining whether its retroactive application violates due process. 49 In light of these principles, it is clear that the State v. Cole court was not free to overrule Kirby retroactively and apply a newly enlarged definition of mayhem to Cole's case. Even if the court had rejected Kirby's holding that great bodily harm is an element of mayhem, the principle of fair warning would have required that the decision not be given retroactive effect. Retroactivity would have been permissible only if the repudiation of Kirby was somehow foreseeable, which it almost certainly was not. Given the ample indications that State v. Cole was not intended to overrule Kirby, and the considerable due process problems raised by such an interpretation, we conclude that State v. Cole did not overrule Kirby. 50 State v. Cole can only be read as expressing no view on the viability of Kirby. The Attorney General of Wisconsin must have so read Cole when he contended in his brief in a subsequent case, State v. Webie, that great bodily harm was and is an essential element of mayhem under Wisconsin law. See supra n. 6. A Wisconsin court would not find meaning in the court of appeals' silence in Cole, nor should we. We must, therefore, reject the Attorney General's and the dissent's effort to interpret the brief, unpublished Cole opinion as holding that a mayhem conviction does not require proof of great bodily harm. The decisions in Kirby and Webie together with the revised Wisconsin pattern instruction, promulgated three months after the cryptic opinion in Cole, all make clear that great bodily harm remains an essential element of mayhem under Wisconsin law.