Court Opinion

ID: 9758172
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:14:31.147902+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:47.661578
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Pomeroy:
When the present appellant was last before our Court he urged, relying on Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966), the inadmissibility into evidence at his 1960 trial of the fact that during a custodial investigation he had remained silent in the *155face of an accusation by his co-felon. Commonwealth ex rel. Shadd v. Myers, 423 Pa. 82, 223 A. 2d 296 (1966).
Recognizing the change in Pennsylvania law resulting from Miranda’s interdiction of the use of tacit admissions, we nevertheless held, relying on Johnson v. New Jersey, 384 U.S. 719, 16 L. Ed. 2d 882 (1966), that the change was not to be retrospectively applied. As Mr. Justice Eagen concluded, in speaking for the court, “after consideration of the purpose of the rule announced in Miranda, supra, concerning evidence of ‘tacit admissions’, the reliance placed upon this Court’s rulings in regard thereto for nearly a century and the obvious effect of its retroactive application on the administration of justice, we rule that it need not and will not be applied retroactively in Pennsylvania.” (423 Pa. at 88.) This holding was reaffirmed, with some modification not here applicable, in Commonwealth v. Dravecz, 424 Pa. 582, 227 A. 2d 904 (1967).1
Notwithstanding that we have heretofore held this very appellant not entitled to the benefit of Miranda, *156the court now nevertheless applies the rule against tacit admissions to his case after all, and awards a new trial. This turn-ahout is justified, in the view of the other opinions, because we now hear Shadd’s case as on direct appeal nunc pro tunc, as distinguished from an appeal in a collateral proceeding (Shadd’s earlier appeal was from denial of habeas corpus). As the Court later held in Commonwealth v. Little, 432 Pa. 256, 248 A. 2d 32 (1968), quite speciously, as I believe, “to apply the tacit admission proscription of Miranda to a direct nunc pro turne appeal ... is not to apply it retroactively.”
Recognizing that the concept of an appeal nunc pro tunc involved difficulties in regard to the scope and reach of such an. appeal, the Court in Commonwealth v. Faison, 437 Pa. 432, 264 A. 2d 394 (1970) undertook to restate the test. On the one hand, the appellant was not to be narrowly limited to the law that existed when a timely appeal would have been filed, nor, on the other hand, was he to be accorded the benefit (or detriment) of all the law that had developed between trial and appeal. “We hold”, said the Court in Faison, “that an appellant may press on a nunc pro tunc appeal an issue premised on a constitutional right which was enunciated subsequent to his original judgment of sentence, provided that this right has been given such retroactive effect that it would have been available to appellant had an appeal been timely filed ” 437 Pa. at 441. (Emphasis supplied.) The proscription of the use of tacit admissions, like the other new pronouncements, of Miranda, has not been given such retroactive effect as Shadd’s own prior appeal established. But today the Court again ignores its formulation of but three years ago, and allows appellant to assert a rule non-existent at the time of his trial and expressly held non-retrospective. Thus not only is the test adopted in Faison by-passed, but also the careful holding in Shadd, supra.
*157This same problem was before the Court in Commonwealth v. Heard, 451 Pa. 125, 301 A. 2d 870 (1973), involving a right asserted under Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 6 L. Ed. 2d 1081 (1961). My dissenting opinion in that case is largely applicable here. I repeat, however, that by holdings such as that in Heard and this one, we continue to discriminate invidiously against the well-counselled defendant who took a timely appeal in favor of the defendant who, for one reason or another, was until lately ignorant of his appellate rights; the latter is given a new trial, while the former has no prospect of release from imprisonment. Thus also do we disserve the cause of judicial administration, compelling our over-burdened courts to redo litigation long since ended, with evidence gone stale and with witnesses, if still available, whose memories have dimmed. It is for these reasons that I dissent.
Mr. Chief Justice Jones joins in this dissenting opinion.

 Justice Eagen’s concurring opinion in Dr avece, supra, which represented the views of a majority of the Court and which was later formally adopted in Commonwealth v. Little, 432 Pa. 256, 248 A. 2d 32 (1968), reconsidered the holding in Shadd insofar as it found the source of the bar to tacit admissions to have been in the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U.S. 1, 12 L. Ed. 2d 653 (1964), rather than in Miranda. It was concluded by analogy to the test of non-retroactivity adopted in Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U.S. 618, 14 L. Ed. 2d 601 (1965), that the ban on the evidentiary use of tacit admissions, “first explicated in Miranda, need only be applied to those cases wherein the judgment was not finalized as of the date Miranda was announced.” Since the Dravecs trial followed the date of Malloy and involved a direct, timely appeal from a judgment not “finalized” as of the date of Miranda (although the trial itself had preceded Miranda), the ban on tacit admissions was held applicable, and a new trial was awarded. This modification of the cases to which the new rule was applicable in no way affects the case at bar, the trial of which long preceded Malloy.