Court Opinion

ID: 9746831
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 14:39:41.914577+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:17.406941
License: Public Domain

WICKERSHAM, Judge,
dissenting:
In the case before us, Charles Daniel Emanuel, Jr., a Chester Police Officer, was convicted in a jury trial of tampering with public records, theft by unlawful taking and criminal conspiracy involving a scheme whereby witness fees were obtained in cases in which Emanuel was not in fact a witness.
After conviction the defendant filed a motion in arrest of judgment alleging that the ten bills of information filed against him were invalid because Frank T. Hazel, Delaware County District Attorney, had not personally signed the informations. It was alleged that Mr. Hazel had utilized a rubber stamp facsimile of his signature. Quite recently the *599Supreme Court of Pennsylvania upheld a rubber stamped information which had not been personally signed by the district attorney. Commonwealth v. Contakos, 492 Pa. 465, 424 A.2d 1284, (1981, C. J. O’Brien.)
Judge John V. Diggins, Senior Judge of Delaware County, agreed with the defendant’s position and arrested judgment and the majority of this panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court has affirmed the action of Judge Diggins. I emphatically dissent.
This case must have been one of the type that Chief Justice Warren E. Burger had in mind when he addressed the American Bar Association at its winter convention in Houston, Texas on February 8, 1981. Chief Justice Burger said, inter alia:
Our search for justice must not be twisted into an endless quest for technical errors, unrelated to guilt or innocence.
******
I put to you this question: is a society redeemed if it provides massive safeguards for accused persons including pretrial freedom for most crimes, defense lawyers at public expense, trials, and appeals, retrials and more appeals—almost without end—and yet fails to provide elementary protection for its law-abiding citizens?
What people want is that crime and criminals be brought under control so that we can be safe on the streets and in our homes and for our children to be safe in schools and at play, today that safety is very, very fragile. ******
.. . and even this will be for naught if we do not re-examine our judicial process and philosophy with respect to finality of judgments. The idealistic search for perfect justice has led us on a course found nowhere else in the world. A true miscarriage of justice, whether 20, 30 or 40 years old, should always been open to judicial review, but the judicial process becomes a mockery of *600justice if it is forever open to appeals and retrials for errors in the arrest, the search or the trial.1
As the District Attorney of Delaware County argues in his well-prepared and well-reasoned brief filed with us, the significance and far reaching effect of this decision is enormous.
If the use of a rubber stamp results in informations that are void ab initio, there have been hundreds of void convictions in Delaware County alone and presumably thousands throughout the entire Commonwealth. A “void conviction” is never waived. Commonwealth v. Belcher, supra. Consequently, an affirmance of the Trial Court by this Court will likely unleash a flood of Post-Conviction. Hearing Act petitions from prisoners throughout the Commonwealth, accurately or inaccurately alleging that their information or indictments were not manually signed. It seems contrary to public policy to allow such a hypertechnical argument, that could easily have been raised pre-trial, to effectuate the overturn [of] a large number of otherwise fair trials and validly obtained convictions. This is particularly so inasmuch as the defect claimed is not one that would prejudice the defendant in his preparation for trial.
(District Attorney’s Brief, at 18 and 19.)
Which all brings us back to what Chief Justice Burger said in Houston—we are again setting a convicted criminal free, not on an issue of guilt versus innocence, but because of a hypertechnical argument.
I dissent.

. Excerpts From Address, The New York Times, Monday, February 9, 1981, § D at 10.