Court Opinion

ID: 9686061
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 15:22:25.338876+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:13.881518
License: Public Domain

On Rehearing
HAMITER, Justice (dissenting).
A rose is a rose regardless of any other name by which it is designated. And the defense motion tendered and sustained herein on March 4, 1955, was only a demurrer or a motion to quash even though it was styled a plea of prescription.
Indisputably the one year prescription was interrupted by the filing of the initial information on April 2, 1954, and it could not commence to run anew until February 23, 1955, when such information was nolle prosequied (the original thereof had been lost or misplaced).
On the latter date, as a substitute for the initial charge, there was filed the informa*571tion to which the defense motion of March 4, 1955, was directed. Although timely submitted, it failed to negative prescription. Solely because of this failure or defect (prescription not having actually accrued) it was vulnerable to an attack by the defendant, the prayer of whose sustained pleading was “for judgment * * * sustaining this Plea of Prescription and that said Bill of Information filed herein be quashed, annulled and set aside and that your defendant be dismissed and discharged.” And such attack had to be made by means of a demurrer or a motion to quash, for as stated in Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure Article 288, LSA-R.S. 15:288, “Defects in indictments can be urged before verdict only by demurrer or a motion to quash, * * (Italics mine.)
Accordingly, the filing of the final information on April 7, 1955, was timely, being well within the 'one year prescriptive period which commenced anew on February 23, 1955,- and the accused should not be discharged. In our .Code of Criminal Procedure Article 8, LSA-R.S. 15:8, it is said ■that if an information, indictment or affidavit be quashed, annulled, set aside- (just as resulted here from the sustaining of defendant’s motion), or a nolle prosequi be entered, the applicable prescription “shall begin to run against another indictment, information or affidavit based 'on the same facts, only from the time that said original indictment, information or affidavit was quashed, set aside, annulled or nolle prosequied.”
For these reasons, as well as those assigned on the original hearing, I respectfully dissent.