Court Opinion

ID: 9853040
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:41:33.735613+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:40.190906
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Justice:
(concurring in the dissenting opinion of CALLISTER, J.)
I concur in the dissenting .opinion of Mr. Justice Callister. In doing so I suggest that the main opinion seems to, disregard our own law.
Some of the punch lines of the main opinion purporting to support it copiously refer to the common law and Blackstone, both of which or whom so far as this case is concerned, are inapropos. Our státute and case law are honorable posthumous testimonials to this. Sec. 76-1-11, U.C.A. 1953, says “A crime or public offense is an act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it, and to which is annexed, upon conviction, any of the following punishments: 1) Death, 2) Imprisonment, 3) Fine, 4) Removal from office. * * * ” Neither the common law nor Blackstone, so far as I know, said what the penalty was for conspiring to. commit any act “for the perversion or obstruction of justice,” — the charge in this case, — and unrevealed in the main opinion. Was it death, imprisonment (and for how long), fine or removal from, of fice, as our statute suggests, — obviously referring to other sections of the statute to determine- the penalty? Did the common law or Blacksone set the penalty for conspiracy to pervert or *76obstruct justice? Was it one of our statutory penalties, or was it trial by ordeal, water, champion, by hanging, the thumbscrew or the rack? The simple answer is that if reference is made to the common law as to the crime it should make reference to the penalty. A simpler answer is that there aren’t any common law crimes in Utah,—they are purely statutory, as Moorehouse v. Hammond1 clearly points up. Therefore, is is disarming to consider or talk about the common law or Blackstone in this case. One wonders what would happen if a person were accused of being a witch or a sorcerer under this perversion of justice statute.
To compare the statute in this case with the burglary statute, equally is disarming. I think any elementary school student could read our burglary statute, understand it and fear its penal implications. But I defy a Rhodes scholar to know or understand the constrictions of the ectoplasmic wording of conspiring “to commit any act * * * for the perversion or obstruction of justice.” Mr. Justice Jackson in the Musser case agreed with such conclusion in knocking out the phrase “to commit any act injurious to public morals,” a phrase not only more euphonious, but much more understandable, in my opinion, than “perversion or obstruction of justice.” Both phrases were separated only by a comma, in the same paragraph of the same statute.
I agree with the main opinion that one part of a statute may be unconstitutional, but another part constitutionally may be preserved. But the main opinion supports this conclusion by citing 82 C.J.S. Statutes § 93, — all of which is Hornbook, but not applicable here, since it premises its thesis on clarity or obscurity of the separate parts. The excerpt from the California Lorenson case does not help, since it is based on acceptance of common law crimes, — which this state does not espouse.
The main opinion forgets that where there is a vagueness or ambiguity in a criminal statute, it is elementary that such doubt is to be resolved in favor of the accused instead of in favor of constitutional reconciliation of words debatably available to the lexicographer, but not to the common citizen.2
The whole section, part of which was destroyed as being unconstitutional in the Musser case should receive the same fate, irrespective of the circumstance of a comma separating the verbal Siamese Twins.

. 60 Utah 593, 209 P. 883.

. Ringwood v. State, 8 Utah 2d 287, 333 P.2d 943.