Court Opinion

ID: 9707958
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 02:25:54.164776+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:40.575211
License: Public Domain

Smith, J.,
concurring.
I concur with the majority opinion, but no one should dismiss the dissenting opinion by McCown, J., lightly. My difference with him lies in a view of Nebraska practice and an intuitive reification of statutory sentencing structures, social defense, deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation. See § 29-2260, R. S. Supp., 1971.
The sentencing judge ordinarily has been acting on a presentence report without advice from behavioral scientists. Scientific investigation occurs at the Diagnostic Center of the Division of Corrections upon admission of the prisoner. The sentencing judge may defer action to obtain a report from the Center or to order a psychiatric examination. A committed offender is eligible for parole prior to expiration of the minimum term whenever the minimum sentence provided by law, less certain reductions, has been served and the judge approves parole of the offender. See, §§ 83-1,105 and 83-1,110, R. S. Supp., 1969; § 29-2261, R. S. Supp., 1971.
When we review a sentence allegedly excessive, from necessity we ordinarily act without expertise. Prior convictions then loom out of a penal policy that grotesquely appears to subscribe to a rigorous sentence for a recidivist. In this case, however, Blunt surely needs treatment to reintegrate himself into society. He is now *636a dangerous offender, a substantial threat. If treatment proves unsuccessful, his léngthy separation from society is justifiable.
The law is deeply indebted to the behavioral sciences which have ameliorated penal policy, but much remains to be done. My difference with McCown, J., is one of timing. The insight of Justice Cardozo more than 40 years ago retains vitality today:
“We have put away the blood feud, the vendetta, the other forms of private war, but in the framing of our penal codes we have not forgotten the passions that had their outlet and release in pursuit and retribution. I do not say that it is wise to forget them altogether. The thirst for vengeance is a very real, even if it be a hideous, thing; and states may not ignore it till humanity has been raised to greater heights than any that has yet been scaled in all the long ages of struggle and ascent.
“. . . the present system, in the view of many, is as irrational in its mercies as in its rigors, and in its rigors as in its mercies. . . .
“. . . I have faith . . . that a century or less from now, our descendants will look back upon the penal system of today with the same surprise and horror that fill our own minds when we are told that only about a century ago one hundred and sixty crimes were visited under English law with the punishment of death, and that in 1801 a child of thirteen was hanged at Tyburn for the larceny of a spoon. Dark chapters are these in the history of law. We think of them with a shudder, and say to ourselves that we have risen to heights of mercy and of reason far removed from such enormities. The future may judge us less leniently than we choose to judge ourselves. . . .
“The law, like medicine, has its record of blunders and blindness and superstitions, and even cruelties. Like medicine, however, it has never lacked the impulse of a great hope, the vision of a great ideal. . . .
*637“. . . ¡Not all her ministers have been true to the ideal which she has held aloft for them to follow. But . . . the word has been proclaimed, to steady us when we seem to falter, to strengthen us when we seem to weaken, to tell us that with all the failings and backslidings, with all the fears and all the prejudice, the spirit is still pure.” M. Hall, Selected Writings of Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, 378 to 393 (1947). See, generally, Ancel, Social Defence, 215 to 221 (1965); Inbau and Carrington, “The Case of the So-Called ‘Hard Line’ Approach to Crime,” 397 Annals of Am. Ac. Pol. and Soc. Sc., 19 (1971); Skoler, “There’s More to Crime Control Than the ‘Get Tough’ Approach,” 397 Annals of Am. Ac. Pol. and Soc. Sc., 28 (1971).