Court Opinion

ID: 9791131
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:06:26.061609+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:34.345273
License: Public Domain

LUSK, J.,
concurring.
I concur. I would add a word relative to the contention that under ORS 168.015 (1) and 168.075, the petitioner has waived his right to assert the invalidity of the former convictions by failing to claim it at the hearing on the allegations of the habitual criminal information. It is said that because of the constitutional defects in these convictions they have been “rendered nugatory.” The words in ORS 168.015 (1) “or otherwise rendered nugatory” cannot be properly construed *642to include convictions the constitutional invalidity of which had not been determined prior to the bringing of the habitual criminal proceeding. If this were so then the waiver provisions of ORS 168.075 would, as applied to some eases, be unconstitutional. The sections of the code in question were enacted in 1961. It was not until 1963 that the Supreme Court of the United States in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 US 335, 83 S Ct 792, 9 L ed 2d 799, 93 ALR 2d 733, overruled Betts v. Brady, 316 US 455, 62 S Ct 1252, 86 L ed 1595, and held -that the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of counsel was a fundamental right “brought within the Fourteenth Amendment by a process of absorption”, and thus made applicable to trials in state courts.
Under the suggested construction, a defendant charged as an habitual criminal because of a conviction prior to 1963, would be held to have waived the objection that he was not represented by counsel, although he could not have known at the time of the habitual criminal proceedings that this was a constitutional defect. Similar cases may arise in the future involving as yet undetermined constitutional rights of persons charged with crime. It is not to be supposed that the legislature intended that an accused should be held to have waived a constitutional right the existence of which neither he nor anyone else was aware of at the time.