Court Opinion

ID: 9684844
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 14:16:19.218663+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:00.432963
License: Public Domain

Robert L. Brown, Justice, concurring in part; dissenting in part. The majority reverses this case in part because the North Carolina statutes that make kidnapping and murder felonies under North Carolina law were not introduced into evidence. I dissent from that portion of the opinion. The following section of our aggravating-circumstance statute is at issue: (3) The person previously committed another felony, an element of which was the use or threat of violence to another person or the creation of a substantial risk of death or serious physical injury to another person. . . . Ark. Code Ann. § 5-4-604(3) (Repl. 1997). The majority reads two additional criteria into § 5-4-604(3): • that the actual North Carolina felony statute must be introduced into evidence; • that the trial judge must instruct the jury on that specific felony statute. It is obvious from a plain reading of the statute that neither criterion is required. Prior to 1977, the predecessor statute to § 5-4-604(3) required conviction of a violent felony to qualify as an aggravator. See Ark. Stats. Ann. § 41-4711(b) (Supp. 1973). That was changed in 1977, and now the statute only requires that a defendant commit a felonious act. Here, the testimony from two witnesses, Angela Blankenship and Steve Cabe, described in vivid and graphic detail Greene’s kidnapping of his niece and his shooting of his brother in North Carolina. What constitutes a felony is black letter law: “A crime of a graver or more atrocious nature than those designated as misdemeanors. Generally an offense punishable by death or imprisonment in [a] penitentiary.” Black’s Law Dictionary (6th ed. 1990) (citations omitted). It is beyond serious dispute that kidnapping and murder fall readily into the felony category. Arkansas law provides that a court may take judicial notice of the laws in other states. See Ark. Code Ann. § 16-40-104 (Repl. 1994). See also Ark. R. Civ. P. 44.1; Ark. R. Evid. 201. Section 16-40-104 amends the common law and casts in stone the General Assembly’s preference that our courts recognize the laws of other states, without requiring that those laws actually be proved or placed into evidence. Indeed, in Wallis v. Mrs. Smith’s Pie Co., 261 Ark. 622, 550 S.W.2d 453 (1977), this court highlighted the point that the trial court could instruct the jury on Missouri law without having the precise Missouri statute introduced into evidence. The Arkansas statute and Wallis case take care of the first aspect of the majority opinion. But the majority goes one step further and requires that the prosecutor make the North Carolina murder statute an exhibit at trial and physically hand the statute to the trial judge before the judge can take judicial notice of it. That mandate presupposes that the trial judge cannot read the North Carolina law himself, which is ludicrous. In addition, there is nothing in the record that says the trial judge did not look at the apposite North Carolina statutes in this case prior to instructing the jury on aggravating circumstances. In short, the majority has seized on an issue for reversal that is pure formality. I would not follow that course. I would remand for resentencing solely due to the error in the trial court’s refusal to grant the continuance.