Court Opinion

ID: 9629187
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:38:55.710038+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:07:16.806017
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE GROVES
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent. I do not regard either of the words “threat” or “intimidation,” standing by themselves and without exposition of the facts under consideration, always to embrace force or violence.
The statute under which the defendant was charged contained a condition that he must have been previously convicted of conspiracy to commit “a felony involving the use of force or violence.” The allegation in the information against him was that he had been “previously convicted of a felony involving the use of force and violence, in that on the 24th day of September, 1975 in the District Court, in and for the County of Adams, State of Colorado, [he] pled guilty to the crime of Conspiracy to Commit Robbery, a felony.” The information gave no further details as to the object of that conspiracy. We must look, therefore, solely to the wording of the statute which, as set forth in the majority opinion, defines robbery as knowingly taking anything of value from another “by the use of force, threats or intimidation.”
I concede that, if the trial judge was stating that the conspiracy itself must be accompanied by an overt act of force or violence, that would be error. Rather, the question here involves a determination under the *351proposition that the object of the conspiracy must be one of force or violence. The majority opinion states that the terms “threats or intimidation” used in the robbery statute connotes force. I think not. The effect of the majority opinion is to say that “threats or intimidation” are an unnecessary part of the term “by the use of force, threats or intimidation.”
As to “threats” the majority relies upon People v. Gallegos, 193 Colo. 108, 563 P.2d 937 (1977). There the situation was described as follows:
“The information charged that defendant possessed a handgun on May 7, 1975, and that he had been convicted of attempted robbery on August 23, 1973. The attempted robbery convictions stem from the defendant’s threat to blow up a Greeley business unless its owner paid him $100.”
There, force and violence were a part of the object of the conspiracy.
As stated, the robbery statute may be violated by force, threats or intimidation. In line with the rule of statutory construction which requires giving independent meanings to distinct portions of a statute, I conclude that robbery is not per se a crime of force or violence. I believe the General Assembly used three different words in the robbery statute because it intended to encompass different situations by its provisions.
I would approve the district court’s ruling.
JUSTICE ERICKSON and JUSTICE DUBOFSKY join in this dissent.