Court Opinion

ID: 9764218
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 03:15:23.117635+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:54.877740
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Manderino:
I dissent because the majority is rewriting provisions of the Constitution of Pennsylvania. Article I, *48Section 9 of the Pennsylvania Constitution unequivocally states that an accused is entitled to a speedy public trial by an impartial jury in all prosecutions by indictment or information. The statute in this case, as the majority notes, provides for a prosecution by information and is, therefore, specifically covered by Article I, Section 9 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
When the language of the Constitution is unequivocal, this Court should not limit constitutional guaranties by presuming to discover what somebody meant almost two hundred years ago. Why can we not accept that the writers of the Constitution meant exactly what they said? VChy must we presume that they intended exceptions to constitutional guaranties when they never said so in the written Constitution? I concede that sometimes constitutional language, intentionally or unintentionally is equivocal—but not in this case—the appellee properly demanded a jury trial and was entitled to this constitutional guaranty.
Even if a study of the available historical evidence were necessary in this case, I could not reach the majority’s conclusion. There is significant historical evidence that the unequivocal language in Article I, Section 9 was intended to prohibit legislative encroachments on a person’s right to a jury trial. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, prior to the writing of the Pennsylvania Constitution, such encroachments had become numerous and serious. The writers of the Pennsylvania Constitution could easily have preserved the encroachments by writing them into the Constitution. They did not do so—in prosecutions by indictment or information. See Kaye, Petty Offenders Have Ho Peers!, 26 U. Chi. L. Rev. 245 (1959); See also Frankfurter & Corcoran, Petty Federal Offenses and the Constitutional Guaranty of Trial by Jury, 39 Harv. L. Rev. 917 (1926).
*49I also disagree with, the majority’s conclusion that preventive justice does not run afoul of constitutional guaranties. In Commonwealth v. Truesdale, 449 Pa. 325, 296 A. 2d 829 (1972), this Court refused to approve a system of preventive justice because such a system would be an unprecedented step and one fraught with constitutional problems in terms of due process. The same conclusion is mandated in this case under the interpretation given by the majority to the surety of the peace statute.