Court Opinion

ID: 9789382
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 01:35:46.519863+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:44:59.486898
License: Public Domain

OPALA, Justice,
with whom KAUGER, Justice, joins, dissenting.
Review by certiorari was improperly granted. This is so because the claimant in this case failed timely to seek rehearing in the Court of Appeals. Her petition for rehearing was dismissed as too late for consideration. Her counsel’s effort now to excuse his tardiness by some “extraordinary circumstances” is utterly unconvincing and insufficient in law to overcome the presumption of correctness that attaches to the Court of Appeals’ dismissal.
A party’s timely rehearing request is doubtless a sine qua non of its eligibility for certiorari review. Rule 3.13 B, Rules on Practice and Procedure in the Court of Appeals and on Certiorari to that Court, 12 O.S.1981 Ch. 15, App. 3.1 The Rule 3.13 B bar should never be lowered to aid a litigant whose tardiness has not been overcome by a cogent showing of force maj-eure.
Every certiorari seeker whose belated rehearing petition has met in the Court of Appeals with a dismissal order must be barred from review on certiorari unless, of course, error or abused discretion is clearly demonstrated. Fundamental fairness to all parties requires that orderly procedure be strictly enforced. ' No area of litigation may lay claim to exemption from the basic strictures of structured practice — not even the workers’ compensation law.2 Though unfettered by a jurisdictional time limit imposed by statute, review by certiorari is nonetheless regulated by a rule-governed process. Any court-sanctioned departure from this ordered system will inevitably bring about chaos, caprice and ad hoc decisions.3 On its review of a rehearing dis*1212missal this court must never be willing to relax the traditional standards of deference to a decision of the Court of Appeals. Nor should it ever claim for itself unrestrained freedom from any rule-imposed impediment. The process of choosing cases for certiorari review should not become a game of chance in which favor is dispensed only to those who are singled out as worthy of the court’s largesse.
Because this claimant did not show that her counsel’s failure timely to bring rehearing was due to an unavoidable casualty, I would dismiss her petition for certiorari.

.Rule 3.13 B provides:
"A party who did not petition for rehearing in the Court of Appeals may not petition for certiorari.”

. Pryse Monument Co. v. District Court of Kay County, Okl, 595 P.2d 435, 438 [1979].

. See footnote 2 supra at 438.