Court Opinion

ID: 9794211
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 03:01:22.1138+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:12:59.435047
License: Public Domain

DURHAM, Justice:
(Concurring Separately in the Result)
I join the result of the majority opinion and agree with the comments in Justice Zimmerman’s opinion. I write separately to call attention to a problem in the majority opinion which merges without analysis the federal and state constitutional questions of “proportionality review.”
It is true that the United States Supreme Court has decided that no comparative proportionality review is required under the federal constitution. Pulley v. Harris, 465 U.S. 37, 104 S.Ct. 871, 79 L.Ed.2d 29 (1984). This Court, however, has never analyzed the question under the Utah Constitution. The majority opinion in State v. Tillman, 750 P.2d 546, 562 (Utah 1987), did say, “We also reject the contention that a case-by-case (comparative) proportionality review is required under the federal or the Utah Constitution,” and I now acknowledge my oversight in failing to call attention to this problem in my dissent in that case. A review of the cases cited as support by Tillman discloses that the specific issue of proportionality review under the Utah Constitution has never been treated by this Court, nor was it treated in Tillman. I *1287now lodge my objections to merging federal and state constitutional questions, without analysis, in this fashion. I do not advocate answering the question under state constitutional principles in this ease because the appellant did not cite or rely on the Utah Constitution in his brief. We should be scrupulous, however, about language which confuses federal and state constitutional principles, for many reasons, and I take issue with the majority opinion’s use of such language here.