Opinion ID: 1111406
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: State v. Kantner , The Abe Thesis Revisited, And The Pre-1978 State Constitutional Right To Privacy

Text: This court's first foray into the constitutionality of the state's marijuana laws occurred in two consolidated appeals, ultimately reported in a landmark package of opinions as State v. Kantner, supra, 53 Haw. 327, 493 P.2d 306, cert. denied, 409 U.S. 948, 93 S.Ct. 287, 34 L.Ed.2d 218 (1972). The Kantner appellants had been convicted of violating HRS § 329-5 (Supp. 1969)a statute preceding the current statutory scheme entitled Offenses related to drugs and intoxicating compounds, set forth in HRS ch. 712, part IV, of which HRS § 712-1249 is a component, which provided in relevant part: Additional acts prohibited; penalty. No person shall knowingly ... possess ... any narcotic drug as defined by section 329-1 except as provided in this chapter. Any person found guilty of ... the foregoing act[ ] shall be imprisoned at hard labor not more than five years for the first offense and imprisoned at hard labor not more than ten years for any subsequent offense; provided that, every person who possesses any marijuana, except as otherwise provided by law, shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than one year, or for not less than one year nor more than five years. (Emphasis added.) HRS § 329-1, in turn, defined narcotic drug to include [m]arihuana. As indicated in the plurality opinion announcing this court's judgment, [t]he sole issue presented [was] the constitutionality of the statutory scheme for the control of the possession of marihuana. Kantner, 53 Haw. at 328, 493 P.2d at 307. Kantner is remarkable for having generated four separate opinions. Chief Justice Richardson's plurality opinion, in which Justice Marumoto joined, announced the judgment of the court affirming the Kantner appellants' convictions. Justice Abe concurred separately in the judgment, thereby creating the majority favoring affirmance. Justices Levinson and Kobayashi each filed a dissenting opinion. Because the Kantner quaternary reveals the conceptual perspective of every member of the court regarding the constitutional permissibility of criminalizing the mere possession of marijuana, it serves as a window into this court's collective mind at the time the issue was first raised. For that reason, it is important to examine each perspective in some detail. The Richardson/Marumoto plurality opinion began its analysis by asserting that the [a]ppellants concede that the State may properly regulate the possession of marijuana under the police power. Id. [13] The Kantner appellants' alleged concession thus permitted the Richardson/Marumoto plurality to avoid reaching the very issue that is before us in the present matter. The plurality then characterized the thrust of the Kantner appellants' argument as being that that the State ha[d] so unreasonably and irrationally exercised its police power that the present statutory scheme for the prohibition of possession of marihuana violate[d] the constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process of law, inasmuch as [u]ncontroverted evidence showed that in some respects marihuana was unlike the opiates and other drugs within the scientific definition of the word `narcotic'. Id. at 328-29, 493 P.2d at 307-08 (emphasis added). The Richardson/Marumoto plurality opinion dispatched the Kantner appellants' position with the following orthodox equal protection/due process analysis: Proceeding from the proposition that marihuana is not a narcotic scientifically defined, appellants contend that the defining of the term narcotic so as to include marihuana and the inclusion of marihuana within the same class as the more harmful narcotic drugs is so unreasonable and arbitrary as to violate the constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process of law. The legislature has a broad power to define terms for a particular legislative purpose, and the courts, as a general rule of construction, are bound to follow legislative definitions of terms rather than commonly accepted dictionary, judicial or scientific definitions. We think the requirements of due process place some limitations on the manner in which a legislature may use words. If we believed that the use of the word narcotic to include marihuana were so misleading as to confuse legislators in their law-making activities or to confuse persons of common understanding in their effort to determine whether the possession of marihuana constitutes a crime, it would clearly be our duty to declare the unconstitutionality of the statute. [14] Inasmuch as the word narcotic in popular usage includes marihuana, it is no violation of the guarantee of due process of law for the legislature to employ such usage over the more precise usage favored by the scientific community. We think that appellants' contentions concerning the legislative classification of marihuana are untenable. Appellants contend that the legislature has placed the offenses of possession of marihuana and the possession of narcotics, scientifically defined, within the same legislative classification. We disagree; the legislature has provided for markedly different penalties for possession of marihuana as opposed to narcotics, scientifically defined .... Appellants' main contention concerning classification is the argument that the properties of the drugs alcohol and marihuana are so similar that a provision for a penalty for the possession of marihuana in a case where there is none made for possession of alcohol violates the constitutional guarantee of the equal protection of the laws. The issue then is not whether marihuana is more like alcohol than heroin but whether there are sufficient dissimilarities between alcohol and marihuana to support different legislative treatments. We think alcohol and marihuana are sufficiently dissimilar to justify dissimilar legislative treatment. Alcohol is a drug about which much is known concerning the long-term effect on the human body; of marihuana, much less is known. On that basis alone, treatment dissimilar to that given alcohol is justified, at least until scientific research conclusively establishes the long-term effects of the drug marihuana. Since it is presumed that statutes are constitutional, [15] and since the party attacking the statute must show with convincing clarity that the statute is unconstitutional, the absence of sound scientific data concerning the long-term effects of marihuana renders appellants' burden insurmountable. .... With respect to appellants' argument that the use of marihuana involves an issue of fundamental liberty and, hence, a different standard of review should be applied to the statute, we do not think that appellants have established that the interest of the individual in possessing and using marihuana is within the class of interests to which the state and federal constitutions accord the highest degree of protection. [16] ... We doubt ... that use of a mind-altering drug, absent an intimate connection with a preferred freedom, requires the standard of review which appellants suggest. Our reading of Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965)[,] leads us to conclude ... that there is no fundamental guarantee protecting the use and possession of euphoric drugs. ... As we read Griswold, supra, the test of whether an activity may be considered to rest under the penumbra of a preferred freedom is that the activity in question must be essential, not merely desirable, for the exercise of the specifically enumerated rights. Affirmed. Id. at 329-34, 493 P.2d at 308-10 (citations and footnotes omitted) (emphases added). Accordingly, by casting the Kantner appellants' argument as a due process/equal protection attack on the reasonableness and rationality of the state's disparate treatment of alcohol and marijuana under its police power to criminalize conduct, the Richardson/Marumoto analysis was able to take the following form: (1) it was unnecessary to consider whether the state's police power extended to the criminalization of the mere possession of marijuana for personal consumption because the Kantner appellants had allegedly conceded arguendo that the state possessed such power; (2) HRS § 329-5 was not so misleading as to confuse the average person regarding its scope and therefore did not deprive the Kantner appellants of due process of law; and (3) with respect to the Kantner appellants' equal protection claim, (a) the use of marijuana did not implicate a fundamental liberty, which would necessitate subjecting HRS § 329-5 to strict scrutiny review, because the use of a mind-altering drug, not being essentialas opposed to merely desirableto the exercise of a specifically enumerated constitutional right, did not rest under the `penumbra' of a preferred freedom ( i.e., was not ancillary to the exercise of an expressly enumerated fundamental constitutional right), (b) HRS § 329-5 was therefore presumed to be constitutional, (c) the Kantner appellants failed to overcome the insurmountable burden of overcoming the presumptionalcohol being a drug about which much is known and marijuana a drug about which much less is knownby virtue of their inability to prove that there were sufficient dissimilarities between alcohol and marijuana to support different legislative treatments, and (d) therefore, alcohol and marijuana were, in fact, sufficiently dissimilar to justify dissimilar legislative treatment. [17]