Court Opinion

ID: 9641896
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:42:52.869572+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:48:51.129152
License: Public Domain

John I. Purtle, Justice, dissenting. Petitioner’s case is presently pending before the United States Supreme Court. Under the circumstances this court should pause in its haste to dismantle post-conviction relief until after the United States Supreme Court decides the matter. By repealing Rule 37, which was established solely to enable us to correct gross errors committed by trial courts which could not have been presented on direct appeal, we evade our responsibility to oversee the judicial process of criminal justice in this state, and, worse, we deny justice, as well. Rule 37 has come to be perceived as a strategem employed by criminals to delay justice. That, however, has never been the purpose of the rule, any more than it has been the purpose of trial by jury. I do not think the rule has been abused, nor do I believe this court is overburdened as a result of the petitions resulting from Rule 37. The majority opinion is primarily intended to soothe the conscience of the court. If this were not the case, we would simply do as we usually do when presented with a petition for Rule 37 relief and deny it without issuing an opinion. Truthfully, the court has been looking for an excuse to abolish this rule for a long time. The sordid facts of this case are used as justification to destroy the only available means of obtaining relief for those who may suffer a miscarriage of justice. Inevitably, meritless petitions are filed on occasion. Granted, our case load is heavy. But then so is the case load in the federal courts. Through this opinion, we are simply trying to channel our Rule 37 petitions into federal courts through actions for habeas corpus. We may thus have cut down on our work load, but we have also increased the burden for other courts and, in some cases, slammed shut the door to justice. The majority opinion is nothing less than an invitation to the Supreme Court of the United States, or some federal judge, to fashion another Rule 37 or something like it. The result may well be more work for us. In any event, it is not our case load that should be the determining factor in this matter, but rather the demands of justice in each case where a claim for relief is made. We ought to consider shortening the time limit for filing for post-conviction relief before abolishing Rule 37. A one-year limit, except for void or voidable sentences, seems reasonable to me, at least on a trial basis. The fact that some prisoners may seek relief on meritless grounds does not warrant our closing this avenue to possible relief for the deserving. Even this court is not immune from error — why else do we permit petitions for rehearing? Sometimes appeals seem to have no merit but that is no excuse for abolishing appeals. The statistics cited by the majority sound horrendous, awful, but upon closer scrutiny a different light is shed on the subject. There are about 5,500 residents in the Arkansas Department of Correction on any given day. The federal courts have limited the Department of Correction to that number at any one time. Because many residents of the Department of Correction are legally released every day, the total number within the department, since January 1, 1988, is actually much greater than the ceiling imposed by the federal courts. About 270 Rule 37 and pro se motions have been filed since January, 1988. This amounts to about 4.5 percent of the population in state prisons. During the same period of time, 1,910 letters addressed to the court were written by prisoners. This volume of correspondence amounts to about one out of every three inmates writing one letter once a year. If these figures are adjusted to include those released during the base period, the percentage of inmates writing or petitioning becomes even smaller. We ought not to take out our frustration with the overburdened system on the residents of our penal institutions simply because the federal courts do not move fast enough to suit us. We ought instead to endeavor to avoid further clogging the federal dockets as well as our own. The majority opinion is the judicial equivalent of a rescuer handing a drowning person a sack of rocks. Our function should be to solve problems, not to exacerbate existing ones or to create new ones. The per curiam issued today adding a paragraph to Rule 36.4 is little more than window dressing. The average person who has just been convicted may well not realize his defense counsel was ineffective. It frequently takes some time for one to reach such a conclusion. Meanwhile, the convicted person is usually locked away without any reasonable opportunity to investigate or even to decide whether he should undertake the Herculean labor of proving the truth about his counsel. This change is neither practical nor fair. It will, however, probably cause most of those convicted immediately to charge their trial lawyers with ineffectiveness. In other words, we are in fact increasing rather than decreasing the workload of this court and that of the trial courts. The constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel demands that an accused be given an opportunity to intelligently consider the matter. The cost of maintaining a person on parole or probation is a small fraction of the cost of keeping that person in custody. The mood of society today is in favor of more and bigger jails, but at the same time the public is unwilling to pay for them. The price of maintaining our prisons will soon be more than all other costs of supporting our government. If we are trying to solve the criminal population problem for society, we should try to persuade citizens at large and the legal system in particular to look at crime prevention and rehabilitation, instead of focusing on detention and retribution. Bigger jails and longer sentences will not, by themselves, solve our crime problems. Historically, the welfare of this nation has rested primarily in the hands of the lawyers, and especially the judiciary. We should therefore lead the way with the light of law and reason rather than follow the dictates of popular opinion and passion. The whole of the inmate population should not be included in the retribution required of one of its number. What happens to Jonas Whitmore as an individual is not more important than what happens to the entire criminal justice system. Steele Hays, Justice, dissenting. While I share much of the dissatisfaction with Rule 37 as expressed in the majority’s opinion, I believe the fault lies not so much in the use of the rule as in its misuse. But that can be remedied, at least in part, and in my view we should revise Rule 37 rather than abolish it. I respectfully dissent to the order entered in this case.