Court Opinion

ID: 9865049
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 16:21:44.879423+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:36:59.650494
License: Public Domain

*265Mr. Justice Bouck,
dissenting.
I dissent.
The decision sustaining the conviction of Roberts, the plaintiff in error, as accessory to murder after the fact is, I think, contrary to sound reason and subversive of basic principles for the judicial determination of facts under the American system of jurisprudence. Assigning numerous errors, Roberts asks for a reversal.
This is not an ordinary case. In two separate trials, Roberts and one Wier had previously been acquitted of the alleged murder of one Butler. The record herein shows that the killing charged in each of these two cases was the identical killing as to which Roberts is now claimed to have been an accessory after the fact. The information herein, filed after Roberts’ acquittal of murder, but before Wier’s acquittal of the same charge, accused Roberts, substantially in the language of the statute, of being an accessory after the fact to Butler’s murder by Wier. Later, after Wier’s acquittal of murder, the district attorney amended the information herein by charging that the murder was committed by a person or persons unknown to the district attorney. An information was thereupon also filed against Wier, charging him similarly with being an accessory to the murder of Butler by a person or persons unknown, which information was dismissed on motion of the district attorney after the aforesaid conviction of Roberts.
It is argued on behalf of the people that the acquittal of Roberts and the acquittal of Wier on the respective murder charges meant only that “the state may not be able to establish [the murder] for the purpose of the imposition of a penalty on the murderer.” It is contended that a verdict of acquittal “does not establish a status of innocence.” This latter proposition, I submit, is not true. Nor is it supported by any recognized authority or by any sound reasoning. As a matter of established procedure, a jury verdict must find a defendant either guilty or not guilty; if found not guilty, the de*266■fendant is, by the the prescribed rules of law and procedure, and according to the plain meaning of language, declared to be innocent. The defendant is in fact and in the fullest sense “presumed to be innocent” unless and until a specified amount of proof is supplied and such is the universal instruction given to the jury. It would be a social and judicial tragedy if a defendant, when found by a jury to be not guilty of a crime charged against him, were denied the legal effect of the verdict. So long as juries constitute an integral part of our criminal procedure, a jury verdict must be accepted by all law-abiding-citizens as final and conclusive—in exactly the same way that judgments of courts must be accepted—unless a competent court declares the verdict to be contrary to law. It would work a travesty of justice to permit a not guilty verdict to be virtually set aside and a declaration of guilt to be made in a purely collateral case by convicting a person of being an accessory to one who has by the recognized criminal procedure been found not guilty when charged as a principal felon. To say that a murder has been solemnly declared not to have been committed by A, but that nevertheless B can be found guilty of being- an accessory to A in the murder of which A has thus been duly and regularly absolved, seems to me such a palpable fallacy as makes the supposed reasoning- mere sophistry and unworthy technicality. Technicalities are as odious when tolerated against a criminal defendant as when they are resorted to in his behalf.
Of course, both reason and authority support the proposition laid down by this court in the case of Howard v. People, 97 Colo. 550, 51 P. (2d) 594, namely, that, under such a statute as Colorado has enacted to define accessories after the fact, the question of guilt or innocence of the alleged accessory can be determined without awaiting a conviction or even a prosecution of the alleged principal. If for any proper reason satisfactory to the prosecuting officers no prosecution of the alleged principal has occurred, as was true in the Howard case, supra, *267where it appeared that the supposed principal “had disappeared and was never found,” public justice and common sense necessarily demand that the district attorney shall be permitted to try the alleged accessory first and in the absence of the principal, assuming of course the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt not only the facts claimed to prove the defendant an accessory, but also the commission of the principal crime by the principal offender, who of necessity must be somebody other than he that is on trial as the alleged accessory after the fact. It is clear that the Howard case is inapplicable to the facts before us. It is true that where the person suspected of being a principal felon has not been first tried, he may be tried and found not guilty after his alleged accessory has been convicted. This has been used as an argument to show that one man may be guilty of being an accessory where the other man is not guilty as the principal. A moment’s reflection will disclose that such supposed accessory would then be the innocent victim of a serious miscarriage of justice and that even judicial proceedings sometimes demonstrate the human fallibility of courts. The given illustration would not turn a non-murder into a murder; it would simply suggest executive clemency for a man convicted by unavoidable mistake.
However, it is argued that the murder alleged is not a murder by Wier, but—by amendment of the information, substituting an unknown person or unknown persons for Wier as the alleged murderer—is an entirely different murder from the one originally charged. Such amendment of the information should be considered reversible error. First, the change was made without any showing to justify it. Secondly, it could only confuse the jury; the change could have produced no result except to inject a framework for improper inferences and sources of distraction on the part of a jury of laymen. Thirdly, no one can read the evidence without knowing that, if a murder was committed, it was committed either by the *268defendant Roberts or by Wier; that if Roberts was an accessory, it could be only with reference and in relation to Wier, whose name as principal was deliberately expunged from the information when the impossible “unknown person or persons” were substituted. It is idle to find that the “murderer” was unknown to the district attorney when he and his staff had tried two previous cases directly involving the alleged murder and had elicited the evidence which shows that, if a murder was committed at all, either Roberts or Wier was the murderer, and nobody else, and that it was Wier who was concealed from the magistrate, if anybody was. There is no evidence tending to show, nor is it contended, that anyone but Roberts and Wier was involved. If, as seems to be the fact, the information is intended to import that somebody other than Wier was the murderer, it was an unauthorized amendment because inconsistent with the facts brought out at the trials.
Wier having been acquitted of murder, as> we have seen, the law certainly should not be allowed to employ the paradox that, though Wier was charged as the principal offender and has been found not guilty, Roberts, charged as his accessory, is guilty of concealing Wier as the principal offender when the latter has been thus solemnly declared not to be a principal offender at all according to the law of the land. A person cannot be guilty and not guilty of a particular murder at the same time. A murder cannot truthfully be said to have been committed by one who is regularly found not guilty of it.
As I have already pointed out, the radical change made in the information—from Wier as the alleged principal to “ a person or persons unknown to the district attorney” —may change the outward appearance of the charge but it cannot change the facts. Nothing can change the fact that under the evidence before us no other person than Wier and Roberts could have done the killing. Whether the verdict acquitting Roberts of murder was due to a showing of self-defense or of coercion exercised *269by Wier, or was due to some other legal ground, we have no means of knowing; whether the verdict acquitting Wier of murder was due to a showing of insanity or other legal defense we cannot tell. The record contains evidence which tended to support some of these defenses. We have therefore a right to draw the inference that the evidence was sufficient to raise a reasonable doubt in regard to the guilt of each defendant.
In regarding the amendment as immaterial, and saying that the substitution of the indeterminate “unknown person or persons” for the definite name of Wier merely “enlarged the charge, making it broad enough to cover a murder by any person, but not eliminating Wier as the perpetrator of it” (italics mine), this court announced a doctrine not found anywhere else in criminal jurisprudence.
I fear it is not promoting the cause of loyalty to our institutions and government, or confidence in our courts, to use language—as does the majority opinion—which would naturally be taken as casting upon every criminal acquittal the suspicion of being a miscarriage of justice.
Compare, as illustrating the principle I have tried to invoke, the following cases:
Kelley v. the State, 79 Fla. 182, 83 So. 506; State v. Antoine, 42 La. Ann. 945, 8 So. 529; State v. Haines, 51 La. Ann. 731, 25 So. 572; State v. Fabiano, 175 La. 983, 144 So. 735; Ray v. State (accessory after the fact), 13 Neb. 55, 13 N. W. 2; State v. Tom, 13 N. C. 569.
Of course, where an accessory is tried and punished as a principal, the rule does not apply. In Colorado, however, an accessory after the fact is not a principal. ’35 C. S. A., c. 48, section 14.
For the reasons above stated, I am convinced that the judgment should have been reversed by this court and the case remanded to the district judge with instructions to dismiss the case and discharge the defendant.