Court Opinion

ID: 9752504
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 18:11:08.473523+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:17.039950
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mb. Justice Musmanno:
The Majority Opinion says in this case: “We have repeatedly stated that we will not overrule our prior decisions on this point which permit such testimony, believing, as we do, that if the law is to be changed the change should be made by the Legislature.” But repetition and vehemence are no substitutes for reason, justice and fairness.
The defendant was accused of a murder which occurred on March 12, 1949. He was arrested on April 9, 1949, and brought to trial on June 19, 1949. At the trial on the charge of murder the Commonwealth was permitted to show that the defendant committed robberies on March 22, March 26, and April 9, 1949. All these robberies occurred after the murder, and had no possible connection with the murder.
The defendant denied that he had committed the murder. lie asserted that the confession which was introduced against him had been wrung from him through coercion and physical violence. Under every rule of simple justice, the evidence in the murder case should have been confined to the subject of the murder. Displaying to the jury the indictments returned against the defendant on robbery charges was bound to influence them against him on the charge of murder.
The whole genius of our criminal procedure is based on the fundamental proposition that irrelevant subjects should not be allowed to confuse the main issue before a jury. No objection is more frequently used in our trials than the one that the proposed query is irrelevant. No prosecuting attorney, in presenting his evidence in any given case, is allowed to raise a *241shotgun in firing at the target of guilt. He is restricted to a precision rifle which must hit the bull’s-eye of truth on the specific crime with which the defendant stands charged.
But in the case before us for consideration, the Trial District Attorney employed a scatter-gun which could not help but hit some vulnerable point in the jury’s deliberations on the defendant’s case. It would be almost impossible for the defendant to overcome the impression conveyed to the jury that if the defendant committed several robberies after a murder of which he was accused, he had to be the kind of a man who would commit the murder too. It is because of this recognized weakness in human nature, of charging a specific fault because of a general fault, that we have so many rules in trial procedure to keep out hearsay, exclude incompetent testimony, and reject irrelevant evidence.
How can a Court, in the face of these ironclad rules, admit evidence of crimes in no way associated with the particular crime on which the defendant is standing trial? The Trial Court said, and now this Court also says, that the evidence on the robberies was not introduced to show that the defendant was a vicious and bad person and therefore likely to commit murder. It was introduced to show that if guilty of murder he should be put to death because he was so vicious and bad that he also committed robberies!
In the case of Commonwealth v. Thompson, 389 Pa. 382, from pages 405 to 429, I traced the history of the error made by this Court, and persists in to this day, in asserting that in a murder trial the Commonwealth may speak of independent crimes for the purpose of augmenting the penalty to be inflicted on the defendant. In that case the Commonwealth was allowed to show that nine years prior to the alleged commission *242of a murder the defendant had been convicted of felonious assault and battery and that seven years before the trial, while in the army, he had been brought before a court martial trial and disciplined.
I said in my Dissenting Opinion in that case: “Now that this Court has apparently thrown open the floodgates on all trivial as well as serious offenses of an accused’s past, it is possible for an innocent man to be sent to the electric chair not on the evidence of murder but because of the suit of peccadillos which the prosecution forces him to wear. No other State permits so bizarre and tragic a performance. Nothing in history since Justinian, nothing in all the logic of Aristotle, nothing in the mathematics of Euclid, nothing in the science of Newton and Einstein can justify so unAmerican, so unjust, and so unreasonable a procedure.”
The decision of this Court in the Thompson case was insupportable enough in allowing evidence of independent offenses committed in the past. But this decision is even more insupportable in law and logic. This decision allows proof of offenses committed in futuro, that is, after the happening of the event which is the subject of the trial. This contradicts every rule of relevancy, it ignores every standard of competency, it strikes down centuries-old safeguards erected in behalf of the accused. We have always looked with horror upon ex post facto laws. To punish a man for an act which, when committed, was not part of the criminal code, is flagrantly unjust, but this decision goes further. This decision permits punishment for a crime which was not even committed at the time of the offense for which the accused is arrested. This is ex post factoism in reverse!
The Majority Opinion says arbitrarily that this Court will not overrule prior decisions of this Court *243on the subject, but it does not say that the prior decisions were correct. In fact, the Majority Opinion writer himself said in the case of Commonwealth v. Lowry, 374 Pa. 594, 603, that “many Judges, including the writer of this opinion, believe that a record of prior crimes should not be admissible even under the theory of aiding the jury in fixing the penalty as permitted by the Act of May 14, 1925, P. L. 759.” The present Chief Justice, in his Dissenting Opinion in the case of Commonwealth v. DePofi, 362 Pa. 229, 251, said: “The thing [introduction of a previous criminal record] could, and no doubt has, actually worked out in practice in a truly shocking way. It is not beyond the range of possibility that where, upon a trial for murder, the defendant’s guilt is doubtful under the evidence, the balance may be tilted in favor of a conviction because of the subconscious effect of the impression made on the minds of the jury by the evidence of the defendant’s prior criminal record.”
I doubt that the other Justices of this tribunal applaud the practice which Justice Bell does not like, which Chief Justice Jones has condemned, and which I abhor, but still it goes on uncorrected. Why? The Majority Opinion says that the correction can only be made by the Legislature, but it was not the Legislature which made the error. The error was perpetrated by this very Court. In 1928, Chief Justice von Moschziskee led this Court astray in the case of Commonwealth v. Parker, 294 Pa. 144, when he said that the Act of 1925 gave to the juries the same power exercised by judges in considering the past record of convicted criminals. The Act of 1925 merely said: “Every person convicted of the crime of murder of the first degree shall be sentenced to suffer death in the manner provided by law, or to undergo imprisonment for life, at the discretion of the jury trying the case, which *244shall fix the penalty by its verdict.” It will be noted that the Act says absolutely nothing about investing juries with the same authority exercised by judges in studying a defendant criminal’s past. Chief Justice von Moschzisker read into the Act something which was not there, which was not contemplated by the Legislature, and which is contrary to the most fundamental concept of restricting a jury trial to but one issue, namely, innocence or guilt of the defendant.
In 1932, after Chief Justice von Moschzisker had led the Court away from the highway of traditional and constitutional trial practice, Chief Justice Kephart took the Court deeper into the woods of irresponsible and illogical procedure by declaring, in the case of Commonwealth v. Williams, 307 Pa. 134, that the jury was to consider the defendant’s prior record for the purpose of determining “aggravation of the penalty.”
Still later, in May, 1949, Chief Justice Maxey, without compass or direction, struck further into the trackless forest and there erected his camp of confusion, by his Opinion in the case of Commonwealth v. DePofi, 362 Pa. 229. Just two years before the DePofi decision, the Legislature, having noted the shambles this Court had made of the Act of 1925, specifically declared by the Act of July 3, 1947 (P. L. 1239) that: “In the trial of any person charged with crime, no evidence shall be admitted which tends to show that the defendant has committed, or has been charged with, or has been convicted of any offense, other than the one wherewith he shall then be charged, or that he has been of bad character or reputation.” (There are three exceptions which are not involved here.)
Chief Justice Maxey found no difficulties in disposing of this solemn utterance of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, designed *245to safeguard the constitutional rights of the accused. He took down his blunderbuss and blasted away. He said that the Act of 1947 was ambiguous. He spoke of conjunctions, restrictive conjunctions, categorical imperatives, and semicolons in the Act but said nothing about constitutional guarantees. He found that the title to the Act of 1947 was “hybrid” and that the admission of evidence was not germane to the subject of cross-examination. He found many reasons to load and re-load, fire and re-fire his blunderbuss until the Act of 1947 was in shreds.
The Majority Opinion here says that the Legislature should pass an Act, but we have seen what happened to the Act the Legislature did pass on this very subject. It is not the Legislature that should pass remedial legislation; it is this Court which should render a remedial decision. It was this Court which took the subject into the sylvan labyrinths of illogicality, complexity, and injustice; it is, therefore, up to this Court to bring it back to the highway of logic, order, and justice. This Court should declare that the legalistic safaris of von Moschzisker, Kephart, and Maxet were but private adventures of their own. This Court should declare that the Act of 1925 meant no more than it said. This Court should dismantle the grotesque superstructure which has been built on the foundation of the simple and straightforward Act of 1925. It should bring juries back to their constitutional duties, unmixed with chores which suggest those of vengeance and retribution.
There is not a single word in all the statute books of Pennsylvania which says that juries shall sit as Saint Peter, reviewing the whole life of the accused, to decide whether he is to live or die. The purpose of the Act of 1925 was simply to eliminate the arbitrary imposition of the death sentence in first degree *246murder convictions. Its purpose was to let the jury decide whether, once it found the defendant guilty of first degree murder, the penalty should be death or life imprisonment because of the specific act of murder of which he stood convicted. The criminal courts of the Commonwealth have not been vested with the powers of eternal judgment. They are to pass on factual questions and decide, from evidence presented in one specific controversy, whether the accused is guilty or innocent of a specific crime. Any departure from that procedure runs counter to the Anglo-Saxon concept of trial by jury.
Something should be done at once to repair the water-tight compartments in the ship of evidence which, so far as the Act of 1925 is concerned, were severely battered by von Moschzisker, Kephabt, and Maxey. However, it would appear that no one desires to undertake the necessary carpentering job. I believe that there is an obligation on this Court to renounce bad decisions of the past. I believe that there devolves upon it a duty to bring trial in murder cases back to what it was before the enumerated three eminent jurists confused the subject by acting as a super-Legislature.
During the argument in the Thompson appeal, one of the Justices said that to order a new trial in that case would be an incongruous decision because other defendants had been convicted by the introduction of the same kind of past record evidence. In other words, the Court was arguing for consistency, but consistency is a jewel only when it adheres to the directions of a reliable compass. No one should try to be consistent with the workings of a smashed weather machine. I do not believe that because the Court has erred in the past there is virtue in repeating the same error. A sign post which points in the wrong direction should be turned around and not followed over a cliff.
*247I said in the Thompson case and I will say today that the piling of error upon error does not finally add np to infallibility. And nntil this Court corrects the error of the past in mis-reading, mis-interpreting, and mis-applying the Act of 192o I shall continue to dissent each time the subject comes before us.