Court Opinion

ID: 9772159
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 17:08:58.159472+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:42:26.544032
License: Public Domain

BLACKMAR, Judge,
dissenting.
I join in the dissenting opinion of Judge Welliver. I also associate myself with the reservation indicated in Judge Donnelly’s separate opinion.
We are obliged to affirm a judgment if it is correct, even though we may disagree with the reasons given by the trial judge. The state’s contrary contention on oral argument is clearly wrong. Judge Welliver properly bases his dissent on the insufficiency of the information.
I am also inclined to believe that § 566.-010, RSMo 1978, goes beyond the limits of state power in defining “deviate sexual intercourse” as involving the hand. This is not the offense of sodomy as discussed in the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States in Bowers v. Hardwick, — U.S. -, 106 S.Ct. 2841, 92 L.Ed.2d 140 (U.S. June 30, 1986) (No. 85-140), and it has no long history of legal sanction such as seemed very important to Justice White in that case. Bowers recognizes a right of privacy under the Constitution of the United States, but holds that this right of privacy does not extend to offenses traditionally punished as sodomy. Its rationale is absent here.
DONNELLY, Judge.
Section 4 of Article 2 of the Constitution of 1875 asserted “that all persons have a natural right to life [and] liberty * *
In 1942, in Barber v. Time, Inc., 348 Mo. 1199, 1205, 159 S.W.2d 291, 294 (1942), this Court found in Section 4, supra, a constitutional right to be let alone.
In the Constitution of 1945, the people asserted again “that all persons have a natural right to life [and] liberty * * *.” Mo. Const, art. I, § 2.
In this circumstance, the holding in Bowers, which dealt “with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the [Federal] Constitution,” may, or may not, *515be considered persuasive when this Court is confronted with the question whether, under our Constitution, the General Assembly may make private consensual conduct a crime.
I file this separate opinion because I wish to expressly reserve this question for another day. “It cannot be suggested that in cases where the author is the mere instrument of the Court he must forego expression of his own [reservations].” Wheeling Steel Corp. v. Glander, 337 U.S. 562, 576, 69 S.Ct. 1291, 1299, 93 L.Ed.2d 1544 (1949) (by Jackson, J.). See also opinions by Mr. Justice Brennan in Abbate v. United States, 359 U.S. 187, 196, 79 S.Ct. 666, 671, 3 L.Ed.2d 729 (1959).