Court Opinion

ID: 9725573
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 11:54:09.153994+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:16.763115
License: Public Domain

WOLLMAN, Chief Justice
(concurring specially).
I agree that the judgment of conviction should be affirmed. I would hold, however, that before a defendant is entitled to an instruction on the defense of justification'in a prosecution for escape he must introduce evidence that would at least create an issue of fact for the jury on each of the five elements set forth in People v. Lovercamp, 43 Cal.App.3d 823, 831-32, 118 Cal.Rptr. 110, 115 (1974), as quoted in the majority opinion. Engrafting the Lovercamp conditions upon the statutory defense of justification seems to me to be a reasonable reading of SDCL 22--5-1, as that statute is applied to penitentiary inmates. Although inmates certainly do not lose the basic human right of personal safety and integrity, it is beyond argument that they are deprived of many, if not most, of the attributes of personal freedom accorded to persons in general society. One of the principal virtues of the Lovercamp approach is that it forthrightly recognizes the very narrowly circumscribed circumstances in which the defense of justification may properly be raised in escape cases. Although as a practical matter the difference between the Lovercamp approach and the approach adopted by the majority opinion may be one of degree rather than kind, see, e.g., State v. Reese, 272 N.W.2d 863, 869 (Iowa 1978) (McCormick, J., dissenting), the Lovercamp conditions provide clear-cut guidelines against which the trial court and the jury may judge justification defenses. As Mr. Justice Rehnquist pointed out in his opinion for the Court in United States v. Bailey, 444 U.S. 394, 100 S.Ct. 624, 62 L.Ed.2d 575 (1980), escape case trials should generally be simple affairs. The conditions set forth in the Lovercamp decision serve to clarify the issues and to narrow the class of cases in which the defense of justification can be raised. Accordingly, I would adopt the Lovercamp rule.