Court Opinion

ID: 9767495
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 05:20:33.257149+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:31.469163
License: Public Domain

Tom Glaze, Justice, concurring. We erred in our opinion delivered on January 16, 1996, and while that error does not warrant granting a rehearing, it is significant enough that appellees are due an explanation. Because I believe the integrity of the court’s opinion comes into question without the court’s correction and clarification, I write to explain. Here, appellees, seven municipal court defendants, had pending misdemeanor actions filed against them in either the Bentonville or Rogers municipal courts. They filed a petition for writs of prohibition in Benton County Circuit Court, alleging the two municipal courts lacked county-wide venue, and the circuit court issued the writs. The state appealed the lower court’s decision, and the defendants’ argued that the trial court was correct because to allow a municipal court to hear misdemeanor actions occurring outside the city limits violated their rights to equal protection of the law. Specifically, defendants argued that “one who does not reside in Bentonville may not vote in the election of Bentonville’s municipal court, and the result ... is the persons not residing in a city having a municipal court are effectively denied equal protection and due process of law. ...” In attempting to answer the defendants’ contention, this court opined, “That argument is answered easily by pointing out that the jurisdiction of the courts in criminal cases is based on the territory in which crimes are committed and not the residence or voting privileges of the persons who commit the crimes.” However, our opinion continued with the following but mistaken analysis of the facts and law: There might be a legitimate equal protection argument to be raised, but it has not been made here. The argument might be that one class is composed of the residents of the city who are enfranchised to elect the municipal judge; the other is composed of the other residents of the county who are not so enfranchised. Misdemeanors committed in the part of a county lying outside any city may, in our system, be adjudicated by a court not elected by the residents of the place where the crime allegedly occurred. It might be argued that citizens have a right to elect the person who tries the cases which arise in the territory in which they reside. Such a class of persons is obviously not contemplated in this case and is not present. Two of the appellees are residents of Bentonville, and one is a resident of another state. (Emphasis added.) In their petition for rehearing, the defendants properly point out that we overlooked the fact that three of them were arrested in Bella Vista, were county residents in Bella Vista or Centerton, but charged in the Bentonville Municipal Court. Another defendant was arrested in the Gann Ridge Road county area, resided in Avoca, but was charged in the Rogers Municipal Court. Clearly these four defendants had standing and fall within the alleged violated class of persons who reside in Benton County, and are not enfranchised to elect the municipal judge before whom they are charged. In its response to the defendants’ petition for rehearing, the state tactfully makes no mention of this court’s failure to recognize the above four defendants and their obvious standing to raise the equal protection argument based upon voting rights (or lack thereof). Instead, the state merely renews its argument in its original brief — defendants in criminal cases cannot raise constitutional issues by means of a writ of prohibition. The state’s argument was correct, Juvenile H. v. Crabtree, 310 Ark. 208, 833 S.W.2d 766 (1992), and in retrospect, our court should have rejected the defendants’ equal protection argument for this reason without stating more. In sum, our error in overlooking the resident evidence, concerning four of the defendants, caused us to give the wrong reason for refusing to reach their equal protection argument. We should be willing to correct that error, and state a correct reason for rejecting the defendants’ argument — a writ of prohibition does not lie to address constitutional errors. I conclude by saying that the court now issues a supplemental opinion wherein it better frames the equal protection argument it had intended to state in the original opinion, namely, “The question of whether persons residing the the county, but not in a city served by a municipal court, would be entitled to have allegations of criminal conduct occurring in their locality adjudicated by a court elected by them as opposed to a court elected solely by residents of a city.” But if this is what we meant to say in our original opinion, the court fails to explain why it was necessary to mention the significance of pointing out that “two of the defendants are residents of Bentonville.” As noted above, the court’s original opinion clearly made no mention of the four defendants who are residents of the county. At least with the clarifying supplemental opinion, defendants now know the so-called “legitimate” equal protection argument this court intended to pose in its opinion. If the defendants missed anything of importance in reading the court’s original opinion (as the majority suggests), it was due to our failure to make ourselves understood.