Court Opinion

ID: 9630017
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:57:42.910009+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:07:29.758647
License: Public Domain

Morse, J.,
concurring. I concur in today’s decision, but write briefly to express my rationale. The Court’s analysis rests solely on the sentence, “The increased penalty for a subsequent offense does not repunish a defendant for the first offense, but rather punishes with greater severity the last offense committed by the defendant.” That statement, of course, is true. It begs the question, however, why an uncounseled conviction may be used as part of the justification to send defendant to jail.
Sentencing ordinarily may take into account past misconduct (followed by conviction or not), and it is true that the trial court in this case was not required to send defendant to jail on account of the prior DUI conviction. If incarceration is unrelated to an uncounseled prior conviction, we would have no issue. But the Court should not facilely avoid the argument. But for defendant’s first and second DUIs, the *522court would not have been permitted to sentence him as severely as it did for the third offense.
The issue is where to draw the line in assigning counsel at state expense to indigent DUI defendants. If the dissent were the law, such counsel would be required in every DUI case in order to consistently apply the DUI sentencing scheme. On the other hand, the price to provide counsel in every case measured against the diminished reliability when a DUI suspect is denied counsel is difficult to weigh.
We know that due process cannot be made perfect at any price. If added burden is placed on one part of the criminal justice system, a price is exacted from another. We know that public defenders’ time is limited, and if defenders are required to defend all indigents charged with DUI, public defenders’ time will be spread thinner.
The question becomes how do we weigh the benefit of more reliable adjudication with the allocation of costs in the criminal justice system? There is no empirical measure I know about, and it comes down to a matter of judgment from experience. In my judgment, the requirement that counsel be afforded to all indigent DUI defendants in order to effectuate the recidivist statute is simply too big a price to pay for the relatively small marginal gain in “reliability.”
I believe the result in this case is fair given the stakes at hand. Defendant was provided an advocate when loss of his freedom was most threatened. The offender knew that repeated DUI convictions would lead to more severe punishment, and the court had wide discretion to fashion a fair sentence under the recidivist law. Finally, in a case like this, the court may consider in fashioning the sentence that an uncounseled prior DUI conviction may have been less reliable.