Court Opinion

ID: 9546123
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:25:13.247459+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:16:01.314861
License: Public Domain

LINDE, J.,
dissenting
In State v. Buttrey, 293 Or 575, 651 P2d 1075 (1982), this court, by a 4-3 majority, held that the crime of driving when one’s license has been suspended is a strict liability offense of which a driver can be guilty without any knowledge or notice of the suspension. Given that holding (and its predecessor, State v. Stroup, 290 Or 185, 620 P2d 1359 (1980)), neither knowledge nor notice is an element of a driver’s guilt at the time when he commits the crime. If the driver is guilty regardless of knowledge or notice, the question arises why the legislature provided an escape by means of an “affirmative defense” when a defendant has not received notice of the license suspension, ORS 487.560(2).
The reason bears on the differences between the majority’s and Lent, J.’s, interpretation of that section. ORS 487.560(2) allowed the defense if “[t]he defendant had not received notice of the defendant’s suspension or revocation as required by ORS 482.570,” a section in another chapter of the code that specified how the Motor Vehicles Division was to give notice of a driver’s license suspension. Here there is no disagreement that the department proceeded in the manner required by ORS 482.570. The disagreement is whether the defendant “received notice * * * as required” by that section.
In State v. Buttrey, supra, the state argued that the purpose of the affirmative defense was not to exculpate drivers who had no notice or knowledge of their license suspensions, as this was not an element of the offense; the purpose was only to give the Motor Vehicles Division an incentive to comply *604with the notice requirements by acquitting guilty drivers who had not been given proper notice. Such a reading of the legislative purpose is not impossible, but it is unlikely, and the Buttrey majority did not accept it. Instead, the majority opinion treated the affirmative defense as a “procedure for the blameless defendant,” 293 Or at 583, in order to “ameliorate the potential unfairness to a driver who had not received notice of the suspension,” 293 Or at 585, that is to say, as the state’s gracious forgiveness of the uninformed driver’s guilt.
The dissenters in Buttrey thought it clear that the legislature’s only purpose was to facilitate convictions by unconstitutionally shifting to the defendant the burden of proof on the element of culpable knowledge of the license suspension, and that the legislature would not have enacted a law making a felon of one who drove in good faith and reasonable reliance on a license issued by the state. I shall not repeat what I wrote in Buttrey, see 293 Or at 590, 594-97. Suffice it to say that once the state’s “deterrence” rationale for the affirmative defense is rejected in favor of a rationale of ameliorating “potential unfairness” toward a “blameless defendant,” as the Buttrey majority put it, that legislative objective is consistent only with Justice Lent’s reading of the words “receive notice” to mean more than a pink slip from the postal service that an unidentified piece of mail may be picked up at the post office. I therefore join in his dissent.