Court Opinion

ID: 9863307
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 03:22:29.641142+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:40:50.785540
License: Public Domain

TEAGUE, Judge,
dissenting.
If you have carefully read, and were able to digest this Court’s majority opinion of Ex parte Rathmell, 717 S.W.2d 33 (Tex.Cr.App.1986), I suggest it is not necessary for you to read the majority opinion in this cause because it is merely a xerox copy, with necessary changes of the names of the parties, the offense, etc., of the Ex parte Rathmell majority' opinion, whose author, Presiding Judge McCormick, also writes the majority opinion in this cause.
Perhaps hoping that a majority of this Court will in the near future see the error of the majority opinion’s ways, or at least hoping that a more enlightened majority of this Court in the future will see the error of the majority opinion in this cause, I file this dissenting opinion. I confess: To a certain extent this dissenting opinion is also a xerox copy of the dissenting opinion that I filed in Ex parte Rathmell.
Over 100 years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States in Ex parte Lange, 85 U.S. (18 Wall.) 163, 21 L.Ed. 872 (1873), stated the following:
[W]e do not doubt the Constitution was designed as much to prevent the criminal from being twice punished for the same offence as from being tried for it. 85 U.S. at 173.
I am unaware of any authority where the Supreme Court has disavowed, expressly overruled, or retreated from this principle of law.
The record reflects that Hubert Richard Spradling, henceforth appellant, while driving a motor vehicle, through one single criminal act, knowingly caused his vehicle to strike Vicki Rash Norvell and Bobby Folks Rash, who were then walking together on the side of a public roadway, and then left the scene of the accident. The gist of the offense is the latter element. *564Both victims died as a result of the injuries they sustained. Appellant was indicted by separate indictments for each death, for failure to remain at the accident scene.
Appellant was first prosecuted and convicted on an indictment charging him with knowingly failing to stop and render aid to Norvell. A jury assessed appellant’s punishment at five years’ confinement in the Department of Corrections and also assessed a $5,000 fine. The time was probated but the fine was not. The Beaumont Court of Appeals affirmed that conviction. Spradling v. State, 628 S.W.2d 123 (Tex.App.-9th 1981). This Court, without written opinion or comment, refused appellant’s petition for discretionary review on April 21, 1982. Spradling v. State, Tex.Cr.App. No. 129-82. The issue in this cause was not implicated in that cause.
Thereafter, the State, obviously disappointed in the punishment that the first jury had assessed appellant, sought to get another bite at appellant by prosecuting him on the Rash indictment. Appellant then went on the offensive to prevent this from occurring. He filed a pretrial plea on the ground that the Double Jeopardy Clauses of the Federal and State Constitutions barred the second trial. The trial court denied his plea. He then attempted to appeal that order, but his efforts were unsuccessful. See Spradling v. State, 634 ■ S.W.2d 89 (Tex.App.-9th 1982). Appellant then sought a writ of prohibition from this Court. On June 16, 1981, in an unpublished and unnumbered order in this Court’s cause of Spradling v. Burgess and Wright, this Court denied appellant leave to file his application for the writ of prohibition. Undaunted, appellant trucked on to Washington, D.C., where the Supreme Court of the United States, over a strong dissenting opinion filed by Justice Brennan, joined by Justice Marshall, denied his petition for certiorari. Spradling v. Texas, 455 U.S. 971,102 S.Ct. 1482, 71 L.Ed.2d 686 (1982).
In the dissenting opinion that Justice Brennan filed, he observed that “the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, requires that, except in extremely limited circumstances, not present here, ‘all the charges against a defendant that grow out of a single criminal act, occurrence, episode, or transaction’ be prosecuted in a single proceeding.” Justice Brennan correctly concluded from the facts that appellant’s “striking and failing to render aid to the two women was but a single act — the accident and its aftermath a single occurrence.”
Thereafter, the State prosecuted and the jury convicted appellant on the Rash indictment. The second jury, however, assessed appellant a non-probated sentence of nine months’ confinement in the Orange County Jail and a fine of $5,000. The Beaumont Court of Appeals affirmed. Spradling v. State, (Tex.App.-9th, No. 09-82-158-CR, September 7, 1983).
This Court granted appellant’s petition for discretionary review in order to review the court of appeals decision, which essentially held that although appellant committed only one single criminal act, by failing to remain at the accident scene, but because there was more than one victim, he could be prosecuted and punished more than one time for the same accident that resulted in two deaths.
It should be observed that our failure to stop and render aid statute, see Art. 6701d, §§ 38 and 40, V.A.C.S., which is a civil statute that carries criminal penalties, provides for just that: It is an offense for a driver of a motor vehicle to knowingly fail to stop and render aid, no matter how many victims there might be.. The statute does not have any sort of scale for punishment, depending on the number of victims or the severity of their injuries. There is absolutely nothing in the statute from which one might infer or conclude that the Legislature intended to allow successive prosecutions for multiple victims. Of course, had the Legislature seen fit to impose more than one penalty, i.e., a separate penalty for each victim, or a separate penalty depending on the severity of the injuries, it could have done so, but it didn’t. Without any showing of what the legislative intent was when it enacted the statute, *565Presiding Judge McCormick, the author of the majority opinion, concludes that this is what the Legislature meant when it enacted the statute, even if it never expressed its intent anywhere.
I find Presiding Judge McCormick’s position untenable when one considers the fact that he is actually acting as a “super” Legislator might act. In this regard, I point out that Presiding Judge McCormick’s views that he does not believe that this Court or its members should ever act as “super” legislators or collectively act as a “super Legislature”, and that “it is not the proper function of the courts to invade the province of the legislative field,” Jackson v. State, 718 S.W.2d 724, 729 (Tex.Cr.App.1986), are well known. Thus, shouldn’t he be filing a dissenting opinion to his own majority opinion?
Once again, see Ex parte Rathmell, Presiding Judge McCormick, the author of the majority opinion, and the members of this Court who join his majority opinion, “exhibit and display an almost naive understanding of the concept of double jeopardy, which has roots that run deep into Greek and Roman times.” (37). And once again, they “value the ancient concept of double jeopardy much like one might value a cockroach.” (38).
The principle of double jeopardy in the respective Bills of Rights is the most ancient of all the principles set out therein. I will, not repeat here my discussion of the concept and guarantee against double jeopardy, as provided by Art. I, § 14, of the Texas Constitution and the Fifth Amendment to the Federal Constitution that I set out in the concurring and dissenting opinion that I filed in Ex parte Rathmell, because it would unduly and unnecessarily elongate this opinion.
The double jeopardy issue here concerns the two distinct interests of finality and avoidance of double punishment.
Both issues, whether appellant committed only one criminal wrong, versus two criminal wrongs, by failing to remain at the scene of one accident, and whether he may be twice punished for committing only one criminal wrong, where the involved statute does not provide for multiple punishments, are before this Court to resolve.
Apparently no longer finding as he did in Ex parte Rathmell, that the Tennessee case of State v. Irvin, 603 S.W.2d 121 (Tenn.1980), supports his position, perhaps because he now sees that it was totally devoid of any legal reasoning, Presiding Judge McCormick leaves the cool hills of Tennessee and goes to the cool waters that the State of Wisconsin has to offer, where he finds the intermediary appellate court opinion of State v. Hartnek, 146 Wis.2d 188, 430 N.W.2d 361 (1988), petition for review by the Wisconsin Supreme Court denied. Presiding Judge McCormick does not inform us whether or not in his travels from Tennessee to Wisconsin he stopped off in Illinois and read the very persuasive decision of another intermediary court of appeals.
However, in my travels in this area of the law, I discovered the opinion of People v. Sleboda, 166 Ill.App.3d 42, 116 Ill.Dec. 620, 519 N.E.2d 512 (2 Dist.1988), certiorari to the Illinois Supreme Court denied. Contrary to the court in Wisconsin on whose decision Presiding Judge McCormick relies, which court is composed of only a presiding judge and two judges, the Illinois court is composed of a presiding Judge and seven justices.
I do not, however, gauge whether or not a court’s opinion is persuasive by the number of judges or justices that court might have. In this instance, I find that the Illinois court’s opinion is persuasive because it was dealing with an Illinois statute that is almost identically worded to §§ 38 and 40 of Art. 6701d. That, however, is not true of the Wisconsin statute.
Justice Inglis of the Illinois court, in a unanimous opinion for that court, ruled that because the defendant in that cause was only involved in one accident he could be convicted only once for leaving the scene of an accident involving death. Justice Inglis then turned his sights on the Illinois statute and pointed out the following: “We find that the statute itself indicates that an individual can only be convicted once for leaving the scene of one acci*566dent since the focus is on remaining at the scene of the accident ... [T]he statute itself recognizes that there may be several persons involved in one accident. Therefore, while there may be several persons injured in an accident, there is only one accident scene at which the driver has a duty to remain.” (522). The Illinois statute, like our own statute, provides only for one penalty for each failure to stop.
In this instance, there was only one accident and only one accident scene.
Probably the biggest distinction between our “failure to stop” statute and the Wisconsin “failure to stop” statute is that the Wisconsin statute provides for a smorgasbord of punishments, depending on whether death, injury, or great bodily harm results. Our statute has no such provision, thus evidencing an intent on the part of our Legislature that there shall be only one prosecution and only one punishment, regardless of the number of victims, for knowingly failing to remain at the scene of an accident.
Clearly, given the issues that are before this Court to resolve, and the provisions of the Wisconsin statute that relate to punishment, as compared to our statute’s provisions, the Wisconsin court’s decision is totally inapplicable to this case.
Furthermore, given the fact that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has mandated, see State v. Rabe, 96 Wis.2d 48, 291 N.W.2d 809, fn. 16 (1980), that it is now part of the Legislative process of that State’s government, and no longer an independent judiciary, and that any of its “old” decisions that are “out of touch with the growing menace posed by drunk drivers to our citizenry’s life and bodily security” should not be followed either by that court or any of its intermediary courts, if they are not written in such a fashion so to “promptly eradicate” by a stroke of the pen the problem of drunk driving in that state, it is difficult to believe that anyone will find any of that state’s court’s decisions persuasive authority.
Notwithstanding my caustic treatment of the majority opinion, if one can accept the fact that this Court is no longer a law court, but has become in more recent times a policy making court, for which one does not need any law books, although we still have them, the majority opinion is at least understandable, although unacceptable as an opinion that should be interpreting a specific statutory law of this State rather than setting policy for the residents and citizens of this State.
Therefore, I respectfully dissent.