Court Opinion

ID: 9585735
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:03:26.606317+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:43.051247
License: Public Domain

Deen, Presiding Judge,
concurring specially.
Were this court now deciding this case for the first time with a clean slate, I would concur with the opinions and outcomes advocated by Presiding Judge McMurray in Smith v. City of East Point, 183 Ga. App. 659 (359 SE2d 692) (1987); Justice Smith in City of East Point v. Smith, 258 Ga. 111, 114 (365 SE2d 432) (1988); and Judge Ward in Murphy v. McClendon, (Civil Action No. 1:86 cv-364-HTW, decided April 8, 1988). (Justice Smith’s comparison of automobile drivers with armed policemen could be extended to suggest that such testing of all taxpayers, students and teachers in public and private schools, as well as all judges and lawyers, who hold no less sensitive positions or places of importance than jockeys in the horse racing industry, could be required under the rationale of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion and would lead to massive and excessive governmental intrusion of the privacy of all citizens.) However, the Supreme Court has ruled on the validity of the testing in this case, and this court, of course, is bound to follow it. “If the line leading from precedent to a particular point has not been marked, we are authorized to *458use the compass of our own judgment, and establish what we find to be the straight line, but wherever the Supreme Court has set up ‘an established marked line, though crooked,’ we have no power to overrule it.” Minor v. City of Atlanta, 7 Ga. App. 817, 819 (68 SE 314) (1910).
While agreeing with Judge Beasley’s dissenting opinion to the extent of acknowledging that Smith, decided by our court, was a one-judge case and that a judgment-only vote leaves the reason “not known,” and further agreeing generally with the analysis on the State Constitution (see: Beasley, “The Ga. Bill of Rights: Dead or Alive?” 34 Emory L. J. (1985)), I have reservations about how the dissent first states that the personnel board’s action in this case was void, yet, in a seemingly inconsistent advisory opinion proceeds to concur with Divisions 2 through 6 of the majority opinion which followed from the initial ruling that the board had jurisdiction to consider the matter. I concur fully with the majority opinion.