Court Opinion

ID: 9751272
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 16:19:16.457664+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:26:42.002739
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Woodside, J.
Not unmindful of the reprehensible conduct of the appellant, I nevertheless cannot agree with the majority that what he did was a crime punishable under the laws of this Commonwealth.
The majority is declaring something to be a crime which was never before known to be a crime in this Commonwealth. They have done this by the application *460of such general principles as “it is a crime to do anything which injures or tends to injure the public to such an extent as to require the state to interfere and punish the wrongdoer';” and “whatever openly outrages decency and is injurious to public morals is a misdemeanor.”
Not only have they declared it to be a crime to do an act “injuriously affecting public morality,” but they have declared it to be a crime to do any act which has a “potentially” injurious effect on public morality.
Under the division of powers in our constitution it is for the legislature to determine what “injures or tends to injure the public.”
One of the most important functions of a legislature is to determine what acts “require the state to interfere and punish the wrongdoer.” There is no reason for the legislature to enact any criminal laws if the courts delegate to themselves the power to apply such general principles as are here applied to whatever conduct may seem to the courts to be injurious to the public.
There is no doubt that the common law is a part of the law of this Commonwealth, and we punish many acts under the common law. But after nearly two hundred years of constitutional government in which the legislature and not the courts have been charged by the people with the responsibility of deciding which acts do and which do not injure the public to the extent which requires punishment, it seems to me we are making an unwarranted invasion of the legislative field when we arrogate that responsibility to ourselves by declaring now, for the first time, that certain acts are a crime.
When the legislature invades either the judicial or the executive fields, or the executive invades either the judicial or legislative fields, the courts stand ready to *461stop them. But in matters of this type there is nothing to prevent our invasion of the legislative field except our own self restraint. There are many examples of how carefully the courts, with admirable self restraint, have fenced themselves in so they would not romp through the fields of the other branches of government. This case is not such an example.
Until the legislature says that what the defendant did is a crime, I think the courts should not declare it to be such.
I would therefore reverse the lower court and discharge the appellant.
Gunther, J. joins in this dissent.