Court Opinion

ID: 9707899
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 02:24:12.185257+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:39.632407
License: Public Domain

BUCHANAN, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
SUMMARY OF THE FACTS — David Monroe first made Kent Persley’s acquaintance late in 1976. The two men became friends; they would meet “maybe a couple of times a month.” R. at 90.
From December of 1976, when this friendship was forming, until August of 1977, the State was proceeding against Monroe for the possession and delivery of marijuana. Accepting Monroe’s estimate, it would appear that the two men met sixteen or more times during that period. The record indicates that Persley himself had been released from the Indiana State Farm only the previous June.
GROUNDS FOR DISSENT — The standard of proof at a hearing for the revocation of probation is a preponderance of the evidence. I.C. 35-7-2-2(d). In reviewing such a proceeding, we will not reweigh the evidence, but will look only to the evidence and reasonable inferences therefrom which support the judgment of the trial court. Wilson v. State (1980), Ind.App., 403 N.E.2d 1104.
Given this standard of review, I cannot say that it was unreasonable for the trial judge to conclude from the circumstantial evidence before him that two men who associated together over a period of many months, one recently out of prison and the other under immediate threat of imprisonment, would talk to one another about their encounters with the criminal justice and *834penal systems in this state. With reason the trial judge’s credulity was not elastic enough to believe that Monroe did not “knowingly” associate with a convicted felon.
The majority would construe the word “knowingly” in a manner previously unknown to the criminal courts of Indiana. When our Criminal Code applies “knowing” culpability to an act, the culpability is applied “with respect to every material element of the prohibited conduct.” I.C. 35-41-2-2(d). This is the meaning that criminal courts always attach to the word.
The applicable statute reads:
A person engages in conduct “knowingly” if, when he engages in the conduct, he is aware of a high probability that he is doing so.
I.C. 35 — 41—2-2(b).
The court which sentenced Monroe to probation was a criminal court. It imposed upon him conditions of probation in the form of positive commands forbidding certain conduct, upon pain of being brought before a criminal court and then being imprisoned. Labelling the proceedings a “civil proceeding” does not remove the trial court’s penal language from the rules of construction we usually give penal language. The sentence, “you will not knowingly associate with anyone who has been convicted of a felony,” was uttered by a criminal court, to warn a criminal defendant advised by a criminal lawyer what he must do to avoid imprisonment. I can not believe that for this one utterance, all participants must be understood to have abandoned the penal meaning of “knowingly” (however ill-defined the word may be) in favor of an undefined “civil” meaning.
In order to prove its case, then, the State needed to show by a preponderance of evidence: (1) That Monroe was aware of a high probability that he was associating with Persley; and (2) that Monroe was aware of a high probability that Persley had been convicted of a felony. Such proof need not necessarily be direct. As is often true,- it may be circumstantial — a proposition that hardly needs citation of authority. The majority reads the condition of probation to require that Monroe be proved to have known of the conviction, as though he had been told about it in so many words. I see no reason to torture the language in this way.
I would affirm the revocation.