Court Opinion

ID: 9694071
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 17:20:33.074788+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:55.204619
License: Public Domain

HEFLIN, Chief Justice
(dissenting):
In the dissenting opinion of Justice Merrill, in which I have concurred, in the case of Hamilton v. Autauga County, 289 Ala. 419, 268 So.2d 30 (1972), the following appears :
“In our recent decision of City of Mobile v. Salter, 287 Ala. 660, 255 So.2d 5, in dealing with a severability or separability clause, we cited Wilkinson v. Stiles, 200 Ala. 279, 76 So. 45, and Spraigue v. Thompson, 118 U.S. 90, 6 S. Ct. 988, 30 L.Ed. 115, for the principle that ‘If a clause in a statute which violates the Constitution cannot be rejected without causing the act to enact what the Legislature never intended, the whole statute must fall.’
“We also said in Salter, supra:
‘ * * * If the act thus deleted of the invalid part is competent to stand without the invalid part, and leaves an enactment complete within itself, sensible, and capable of being executed, it will stand, unless the two parts — the valid and invalid — are so inseparable as to raise the presumption that the Legislature would not have enacted the one without the other. * * * ’ [Emphasis supplied]”
In the present case after the invalid portions are stricken, Act No. 1177 of the 1973 Regular Session of the Alabama Legislature applies to all counties in the state with a population of less than 600,000. The Act as passed by the legislature excluded all counties where the salaries of deputy sheriffs were fixed and controlled by merit system or a civil service board. Obviously, this exception prevented legislative opposition from merit and civil service counties. In my judgment, the Act would *139never have passed the legislature without the exclusion. It appears to me that the majority opinion by the use of the severability clause is making the Act effective in many counties in which the legislature intended that the Act not be effective. Thus, the treatment given the severability clause gives more effect than the expressed intention of the legislature in dealing with numerous counties of the state.
Therefore, I respectfully dissent.
MERRILL, FAULKNER and JONES, JJ., concur.