Court Opinion

ID: 9710094
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 04:01:55.701354+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:54.191342
License: Public Domain

MACK, Senior Judge,
concurring:
Judges, in this century, have uniformly looked to “Legislative History” to resolve real or imaginary ambiguities in the language or meanings of legislative enactments. It comes as a cultural shock to some of us, therefore, to realize that in some arenas the onerous necessity for research may be obliterated. (See the concerns expressed by [now] Justice Stephen Breyer in The 1991 Justice Lester W. Roth Lecture — On the Uses of Legislative History in Interpreting Statutes, 65 S. Cal.L.Rev. 845 (1992).)1 The news is all the more unnerving when a court finds that it is prohibited from examining the history of a statute that might shed some light on its intended consequences and/or constitutional validity.
The statutory provision under consideration here is a criminal one, limited in language to nothing more than a stark and sterile pronouncement, reducing a term of imprisonment (to a maximum commensurate with a “petty” offense) for a crime (formerly triable by a jury at. common law). In the absence of exploration, we have no way of knowing the purpose of the Council in rewriting the pre-existing provision. We have no way of knowing (as other appellants in similar circumstances have argued) whether the Council sought to increase the severity and likelihood of sanctions by forcing defendants to forfeit a trial by jury (see Burgess v. United States, 680 A.2d 1033 (D.C.1996)), whether it nevertheless considered the crime a “serious” one, or whether it sought to decrease the length of imprisonment to clear prison space for those convicted of more serious crimes.
In any event, I cannot think of a more inappropriate setting in which to begin the curtailing of reliance upon legislative history. However unnerving this may be, our case law *1131dictates it.2 See Stevenson v. District of Columbia, 562 A.2d 622 (D.C.1989); Foote v. United States, 670 A.2d 366 (D.C.1996); Burgess v. United States, supra.
I concur.

. See W. David Slawson, Legislative History and the Need to Bring Statutory Interpretation Under the Rule of Law, 44 Stan.L.Rev. 383 (1992); Jack Schwarz & Amanda Stuken Conn, The Court of Appeals at the Cocktail Party: The Use and Non-use of Legislative History, 54 Md.L.Rev. 432; Note, Why Learned Hand Would Never Consult Legislative History Today, 105 Harv.L.Rev. 1005 (1992).

. It may or may not be that the legislative body of a cash-strapped municipality is without the prescient advantage that the United States Congress, with its numerous aides, enjoys. Moreover in following the dictates of United States Supreme Court decisions, we are nevertheless without knowledge of congressional assessment of the intent of the D.C. Council.