Court Opinion

ID: 9645565
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 21:28:25.909346+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:27.933274
License: Public Domain

HOWELL, Justice,
dissenting.
I dissent. This is a penal statute and must be construed as such. Traditionally, the courts have been construed as possessing wide powers to reduce penalties and to enter remittiturs thereon. In the case at hand, there was, essentially speaking, only one violation. That violation was complete on the thirty-first day after the City elected to discontinue use of the landfill. To say that “each day of violation” is a separate offense is the equivalent of holding that a thief commits a new crime on each day that he retains the victim’s property. As applied to the facts of this case, the concept of continuing violation is more semantic than real.1 The “each day of violation” provision of the statute should be construed as a minimum standard of proof that the State must meet in order to exact a penalty rather than as a measure of the punishment that may be imposed. Semantic discussions with regard to “continuing violation” as opposed to a series of new and independent violations shed little light upon the problem at hand.
It was within the court’s discretion to determine that punishment equal to the $100 per day minimum was sufficient to deter future violations and to deny punishment for more than a fifty-day period even though remedial work had not commenced by the end of said fifty days. It should be borne in mind that the defendant is a municipality and that any penalty assessed *171will not be paid by the real offender or offenders but by innocent citizen-taxpayers. This penal statute should be construed as authorizing the trial court to remit all penalties accruing after the fiftieth day of violation. Such is a reasonable construction of the phrase “as the court may deem proper.”
If we take the approach urged by the State, the statute of limitations will never apply because the offense is continuing. After ten years, the court will be powerless to assess less than $365,000 even if the violation were not detected and called to the offender’s attention until the last day of the tenth year. The $141,900 penalty being assessed herein would literally bankrupt hundreds of small municipalities of this state. Within thirty years or so, the minimum penalty would exceed one million dollars. The example may seem extreme, but the statute fixes no limit upon the power of the state authorities to hunt for old abandoned trash dumps that were improperly covered, to hunt out the owners and to demand the penalties fixed by law. Perhaps, there should be no time limit on their authority to do so.
However, the court involved in the case should be empowered to fashion a punishment sufficient to fit the crime.2
I dissent. The State does not challenge the trial court for an abuse of discretion. Not being requested to apply the abuse of discretion test, we should refrain from doing so. We should overrule the contention that the trial court was powerless to fix a lesser penalty and affirm the $5,000 fine imposed.

. It is true that statutes fixing penalties relating to the use or condition of real property generally speak in terms of “continuing violation” and often set penalties on a per diem basis. The reasoning behind this approach is to relieve the prosecutor of proving the date upon which the violation first occurred and to provide an incentive to the property holder to remedy the condition in order to prevent additional penalties from accruing. Nevertheless, semantics aside, if it be accepted that the only legitimate objective of penal laws is to discourage human misconduct and to punish violations that have occurred, we must accept that the human misconduct here involved occurred primarily, if not exclusively, before the end of the thirty-day coverup period. Any subsequent misconduct was identical to the misconduct of the thief who failed to return stolen goods.

. Alternatively, it is presented that the majority has disregarded the "inclement weather” provision. That proviso may be read in at least three ways:
(1) If the weather is inclement on the thirtieth day, the duty to cover is excused and the violator may never be punished (a most literal but entirely incomprehensible interpretation).
(2) If the weather is inclement on the thirtieth day, no violation occurs on that day but the duty to cover remains in effect and the violation is complete on the first day when the weather is not inclement.
(3) If the weather is inclement on any date beginning with the thirty-first day, no violation occurs on that specific date and that specific date must be excluded in the calculation of penalties.
If the State’s concept of each day as a new and independent violation is to be accepted, it must also be accepted that no violation occurred on any date within the 1,419 day period when the weather was inclement. We know judicially that there are numerous days of inclement weather during each and every year. Yet the State, having the burden in this penal action, presented no evidence of the specific dates on which the weather would permit coverup operations. Perhaps, the case should be remanded to remedy this deficiency in the evidence. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the trial court took this deficiency in the proof into consideration in fixing the penalty. Inasmuch as the State does not challenge the sufficiency of the court's finding, that finding should not be disturbed.