Court Opinion

ID: 9535361
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 04:48:22.194113+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:33:13.731736
License: Public Domain

ROBERTS, Justice,
dissenting.
Today the majority affirms a trial court’s decision to permit an ex parte trial when counsel’s excusable absence at a state court trial resulted from prior federal courtroom trial commitments and his active participation in a trial in progress of which he had informed both the court and opposing counsel. The record reveals the court inexcusably failed to inform counsel that it would proceed ex parte. Indeed, counsel appeared the following day, fully expecting *641trial to proceed. Again, I must “express my strong disagreement with any rule of court which subordinates the quality of justice to the hazards of arbitrary insistence upon an ‘assembly-line’ disposition of cases. Such inflexibility neither serves the interests of justice nor advances the proper objectives of effective court administration.” Budget Laundry, Inc. v. Munter, 450 Pa. 13, 24, 298 A.2d 55, 59 (1972) (Roberts, J., joined by Nix and Manderino, JJ., concurring). I must dissent from this extraordinarily unfair and unexpectable result.
Everyone in and out of the legal profession knows that a trial lawyer cannot be trying one case in a federal courtroom and another case in a state courtroom on the same day, at the same hours. Yet despite this immutable principle, the trial court ignored reality and imposed the harshest of all trial sanctions upon an innocent litigant seeking justice — no trial at all when litigant’s counsel was actively at trial in a different courthouse.
The trial judge closed the courtroom to the litigant, his witnesses and counsel and converted an adversary court trial into one in which the only litigant present and represented by counsel was certain to prevail. The trial court’s justification for directing such a uniquely unjust result was “calendar control.” But this record does not reveal the sound administration of the court’s calendar. Instead, it demonstrates mismanagement of the most profound sort, mismanagement of the very processes which should promote and ensure the sensible and just operation of our trial courts.
Today’s uneven-handed result is inexplicable in light of this Court’s recent determination that judicial relief should be granted a litigant whose attorney failed to timely file an appeal, not because to do so would have defied the laws of nature, but rather because of negligence. Bass v. Commonwealth, 485 Pa. 256, 401 A.2d 1133 (1979) (Roberts, J., joined by Eagen, C. J., dissenting). Certainly, no less relief is due here.
*642I am confident that the wisdom and sense of fairness of our trial judges will forestall the great harm of this affirmance.