Court Opinion

ID: 9784471
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 20:45:39.313095+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:35:54.980753
License: Public Domain

Justice COATS,
dissenting.
Because I believe the majority wrongly characterizes section 18-1.4-102(l)(e) as special legislation and therefore erroneously strikes it down as prohibited by article V, section 25 of the state constitution, I respectfully dissent. Because I am, however, even more disturbed by the majority’s willingness to by-pass the well-established ex post facto analyses of both the federal and state constitutions (which I believe would require it to reach the opposite result), and instead discover, in an obscure provision of the state constitution, a never-before recognized limitation on the power of the legislature to apply its acts retroactively, I feel compelled briefly to articulate my concerns.
Like a number of other states entering the Union before the twentieth century, Colorado included in its constitution various provisions resolving contemporaneous debates about the reach of the legislative power, in particular areas of the law, and limiting favoritism by the general assembly. See Dale A. Oesterle & Richard B. Collins, The Colorado State constitution: A Reference Guide 132 (2002); Walter Carrington, 1 Cooley’s Constitutional Limitations 258 n. 8 (8th ed.1927). Article V, Section 25 bars special legislation in 23 separate categories,1 often overlapping with other similarly motivated provisions, see, e.g., Art. II, Section 11 (forbidding special privileges, franchises or immunities); and it prohibits special laws in any case in which a general law can be made applicable. While the term is not constitutionally defined, special laws have generally been understood to include not only those laws relating to particular persons, entities, places, or things by name, but also laws relating to persons, entities, places, or things, even if not particularized by name, numbering fewer than the entire class of those similarly situated. Determining whether a law is special, despite not naming a particular individual or entity, has therefore been acknowledged to turn on the question whether the classification it creates is reasonable, or whether it is instead purely arbitrary, artificial, illusory, or fictitious.
As the majority concedes, under these standards, acts of the general assembly have almost never in the history of the state been struck down as special laws, and particularly not since the modem development of the equal protection clause. In 1899, this court disapproved a proposed bill, whose “sole purpose and object” was concededly to permit four specific school districts, partly within the City of Denver, to join with the city’s *387school district, in the absence of any other reason to single them out for treatment different from other districts also governed by the general school law of the state. See In re Senate Bill No. 9, 26 Colo. 136, 56 P. 173 (1899). Again in 1961, this court disapproved a bill providing for Denver’s annexation of Glendale, without naming it, finding among other things that “[tjhere [was] no conceivable reason for differentiation to be made between a 640-acre surrounded town and a 640-acre surrounded city.” See In re Senate Bill No. 95 of the Forty-Third General Assembly of the State of Colorado, 146 Colo. 233, 238, 361 P.2d 350, 353 (1961). And finally in 1971, in what might be considered a third reliance on the provision, this court upheld a trial court finding that a statute imposing a burden on motel, but not hotel, signage violated Art. V, Sec. 25, but it did so solely on the ground that the statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause. People v. Sprengel, 176 Colo. 277, 490 P.2d 65 (1971).
By contrast with those three cases, the class distinction affecting the defendant in this case is not only rational; it is also dictated by historical circumstance rather than legislative choice. The general assembly did not single this class out by design. It merely made clear its intent that capital defendants who had already been convicted, but not yet sentenced, when the United States Supreme Court abruptly overturned its own decision in Walton v. Arizona,2 be sentenced by a jury rather than the court, like capital defendants not yet placed in jeopardy. Although defendants who had already been convicted could not, as a practical matter, be sentenced by the same jury that found them guilty, the Supreme Court has never required as much; and it was certainly possible, as a practical matter, to require the state to demonstrate aggravation, and permit those defendants to present any relevant mitigation, to a new jury, in lieu of the sentencing windfall now ordered by the majority. Rather than addressing the reasonableness of this class distinction in light of the historical circumstances, however, the majority simply finds the class to be “illusory,” for the sole reason that it can never expand beyond its current membership of two.
On a number of occasions, we have disregarded the limited size of a class to which particular legislation applied, noting among other reasons that the affected class had the capacity to grow; and on one occasion, we struck down a law as special legislation because the general assembly crafted it so narrowly and arbitrarily, in part by artificially cutting off the ability of the affected class to expand in- the future, that it could never apply to more than one situation — the annexation of Glendale by Denver. See In re Senate Bill No. 95, 146 Colo. 233, 361 P.2d 350. We have never before suggested, however, that the inability of a statute ever to affect more than a small class renders the classification illusory or renders the law special legislation. 1 The circumstances of the current statute are enough to expose the inappropriateness of such a proposition.
Membership in the class that includes the defendant in this case is not limited by legislative design but by historical and constitutional necessity. Rather than artificially limit the class to a predetermined individual, the legislature clearly sought to apply the mandate of the Supreme Court as broadly as factually possible and constitutionally permissible. Whether it is constitutionally permissible to apply this new sentencing statute backward in time, to include defendants who have already been found guilty by a jury of a capital offense, clearly turns on the scope of the constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws. The majority, however, avoids this analysis by creating a new constitutional limitation (under the rubric of “special legislation”), barring the legislature from applying its laws to any class that has already “closed” if, as fate would have it, the number of individuals actually falling within the class turns out to be small. Whether it is constitutionally permissible to provide a benefit to, or impose a burden upon, such a class will always warrant further analysis; but whether *388the class is illusory, simply because, as a factual matter, it will remain forever small, cannot be the subject of serious debate.
A substantial body of case law has been developed, by both this court and the United States Supreme Court, concerning the applicability of capital sentencing procedures to offenses committed before their adoption. See, e.g., Dobbert v. Florida, 432 U.S. 282, 97 S.Ct. 2290, 53 L.Ed.2d 344 (1977); People v. Dist. Court, 834 P.2d 181 (Colo.1992). While I strongly believe the principles established in those analyses would sanction the legislative action at issue here, I am even more convinced that they provide the relevant framework for analysis. I therefore find of particular concern the majority’s decision to by-pass this established body of thought and law (upon which the legislature clearly relied), and to rest its holding on a new and novel construction of an undeveloped provision of the state constitution, which was clearly not designed for (and has never before been thought to apply to) the analysis of retroactivity in capital sentencing.
It is always tempting for courts to circumvent long years of analysis and construction that have preceded them, by subtly altering the framework of analysis. Particularly when the change occurs as a sudden break from the past, rather than as a natural and incremental stream of development, the judiciary is understandably subject to criticism for rewriting constitutional limitations on the power of the legislature. The judiciary, no less than the legislature, is bound by ease law that defines the relationship between the two branches.
Because I am extremely apprehensive about the implications of expanding the meaning of “special legislation,” as I believe the majority has done today; and because I would uphold the constitutionality of the statute at issue in this case, under what I believe to be the appropriate constitutional analysis, I respectfully dissent.
I am authorized to say Justice KOURLIS joins in this dissent.

. With regard to the granting of divorces, for example, the first of the specifically enumerated limitations of art. V, sec. 25, Cooley notes:
The granting of divorces from the bonds of matrimony was not confided to the courts in England, and from the earliest days the Colonial and State legislatures in this country have assumed to possess the same power over the subject which was possessed by the Parliament, and from time to time they have passed special laws declaring a dissolution of the bonds of matrimony in special cases. Now it is clear that the question of divorce involves investigations which are properly of a judicial nature and the jurisdiction over divorces ought to be confined exclusively to the judicial tribunals, under the limitations to be prescribed by law, and so strong is the general conviction of this fact, that the people in framing their constitutions, in a majority of the States, have positively forbidden any such special laws.
Carrington, supra, at 208 (internal quotations and citations omitted).

. 497 U.S. 639, 110 S.Ct. 3047, 111 L.Ed.2d 511 (1990), overruled by Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584, 122 S.Ct. 2428, 153 L.Ed.2d 556 (2002).