Court Opinion

ID: 9679170
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 06:43:14.807701+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:10.993799
License: Public Domain

LAURA DENVIR STITH, Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the principal opinion’s determination that those engaged in the retail sale of veterinary drugs are not subject to regulation by the board of pharmacy under chapter 338, RSMo 2000. I write separately to disagree with the principal opinion’s determination that it should reach this result in part by application of the “rule of lenity.” While the principal opinion is correct that the rule of lenity is applied in interpreting ambiguous criminal statutes, here we are asked in a declaratory judgment action to determine generally whether an administrative agency has authority to regulate the dispensing of veterinary drugs at retail, not specifically whether someone can be held to account under a criminal or penal statute. In this circumstance, the analysis of whether the pharmacy act applies to a particular party should be determined by application of the rules of construction normally applied to *914statutes that contain both remedial and penal provisions. The analysis in this case need not be complicated by applying a rule of construction intended for criminal cases to this declaratory judgment context.

DISCUSSION:

The rule of lenity “gives a criminal defendant the benefit of a lesser penalty where there is an ambiguity in the statute allowing for more than one interpretation.” Woods v. State, 176 S.W.3d 711, 712 (Mo. banc 2005). It is a rule of mercy that, until recently, had been applied exclusively in criminal cases. A search in the Missouri cases database on Westlaw for the term “lenity” reveals thirty-two cases invoking the rule of lenity.1 All but two of these eases involve criminal defendants urging that a criminal statute is ambiguous and the defendant therefore is entitled to the more lenient interpretation. The two exceptions are J.S. v. Beaird, 28 S.W.3d 875 (Mo. banc 2000), and City of Kansas City v. Tyson, 169 S.W.3d 927, 929 (Mo.App. W.D.2005), which expressly followed J.S. v. Beaird.
In all other civil cases involving statutes containing both remedial and penal provisions; this Court has applied the rule of construction that, “[w]here a statute is both remedial and penal, remedial in one part while penal in another, it should be considered a remedial statute when enforcement of the remedy is sought and penal when enforcement of the penalty is sought.” City of St. Louis v. Carpenter, 341 S.W.2d 786, 788 (Mo.1961) (construing civil statute broadly where only remedial provisions were implicated). Remedial statutes are interpreted liberally to give broad meaning to their remedial purpose. See Abrams v. Ohio Pacific Express, 819 S.W.2d 338, 341 (Mo. banc 1991). Statutes of a penal nature, on the other hand, “are always strictly construed, and can be given no broader application than is warranted by [their] plain and unambiguous terms.” City of Charleston ex rel. Brady v. McCutcheon, 360 Mo. 157, 227 S.W.2d 736, 738 (banc 1950).
The court of appeals has followed this rule of statutory interpretation fairly closely. See Kansas City Star Co. v. Shields, 771 S.W.2d 101, 104 (Mo.App. W.D.1989) (holding that one sub-section of a statute is penal because it imposes a fine, but “the other portions of the statute ... are to be liberally construed”); Structo Corp. v. Leverage Inv. Enterprises, Ltd., 613 S.W.2d 197, 202 n. 2 (Mo.App. W.D.1981) (“When the remedial part of a statute, also penal in other aspects, is the subject of enforcement, it is considered remedial for the purposes of decision”); State ex rel. Ashcroft v. Wahl, 600 S.W.2d 175, 180 (Mo.App. W.D.1980) (refusing to construe a civil statute that contained penalty provisions strictly against the state because “any possibility of a criminal charge ha[d] been abandoned by the state” and therefore the “penal attributes of [the statute] are ... not in this case”).
While the practical effect of strict construction of a penal statute normally would be the same as would application of the rule of lenity, Missouri courts interpreting remedial statutes never utilized the rule of lenity in a case involving a statute that contained both civil remedial and penal provisions until J.S. v. Beaird, 28 S.W.3d 875 (Mo. banc 2000). In that case, a citizen convicted of a sex offense sought in-junctive and declaratory relief from the sexually violent predator statute’s registration requirement. This Court employed a *915contextual reading of the statute to conclude that its requirement of registration upon “coming into any county” did not apply to individuals whose county of residence did not change. Id. at 876-77. The Court also noted that the rule of lenity “reinforced” its “contextual reading” because, although “the requirement of registration is not necessarily punitive, sections 589.400 to 589.425 penalize a failure to register as a class A misdemeanor and subsequent offenses as a class D felony.” Id. at 877.
The Court in J.S. acknowledged (at least implicitly) that the statute had both remedial and penal provisions, but it neither expressly relied on those distinctions to reach its conclusion, nor mention the fact that it was the first to use the rule of lenity to interpret a civil statute in a declaratory judgment action. Similarly here, the principal opinion does not acknowledge the distinctions between the remedial and penal provisions of the pharmacy statute, employing instead the rule of lenity.
J.S. is also unusual in that it is apparently only the third of this Court’s cases to seek a declaratory judgment regarding the scope and application of a civil regulatory act that contains both remedial and penal provisions. The two prior cases to do so are City of St. Louis v. Carpenter, 841 S.W.2d 786, 788 (Mo.1961), and Borden Co. v. Thomason, 353 S.W.2d 735, 753 (Mo. banc 1962). According to Carpenter, the statute before it was remedial in effect; thus, it was construed liberally. 341 S.W.2d at 788 (“coverage of the law ... is remedial and should be liberally construed”). By contrast, in Borden, despite the presence of penalty provisions that included treble damages, this Court broadly construed the statute because it “contains no criminal penalties and is not a criminal statute, and is not required to be strictly construed against the State.” Borden, 353 S.W.2d at 755. Although J.S. did not expressly overrule Borden’s or Carpenter’s use of a broad construction in a declaratory judgment action, by borrowing the rule of lenity from the criminal context to interpret a statute with both remedial and penal provisions, it implicitly rejected the conclusion in those cases that statutes with both penal and remedial provisions should be broadly or liberally construed.
This Court in both J.S. and this case could have reached the same result in reliance on the traditional method of analyzing a civil statute, set out above, without borrowing the rule of lenity from the criminal law. Where, as here, the Court interprets the reach of a civil statute that provides penal sanctions for noncompliance, it is appropriate to employ strict construction to limit its scope to only those persons or entities that are clearly regulated by the statute’s literal meaning. If the scope of such statutes were given a broad construction, then a class of persons who reasonably believed that they were not required to comply with the statute could unexpectedly be at risk of punitive sanctions for noncompliance,2 which would be inconsistent with prior Missouri cases construing penal statutes strictly according to their terms.
In sum, as this case does not involve an immediate threat of criminal sanctions, but merely seeks a declaration whether a particular class of person or entity is subject to regulation under the pharmacy act, reliance on the rule of lenity is misplaced. It would be more appropriate to hold that, in *916a context such as this, the statute will be given a narrow construction.
For these reasons, I concur in the result.

. A search in the Missouri cases database on Westlaw for the term “lenity” yields 38 results. The oldest six of those cases (three of which are from the 19 th century) use the term "lenity” in the opinion, but not as a term of art in reference to the rule of lenity.

. As a criminal violation would require proof of a knowing violation, and as it would be difficult to prove knowing violation of a statute never before held to apply to a particular class of persons, the likelihood of imposition of criminal sanctions is small, but nonetheless would be an additional potential risk of a broad interpretation.