Court Opinion

ID: 9537865
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 07:26:02.087162+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:57:06.483751
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Justice
(dissenting).
I dissent and refer to my former dissent.
Here is a defendant who was ordered but failed to appear for sentence on March 10, 1969, after deliberately violating his probation. The law providing for a lesser sentence for the offense for which already he had been convicted by pleading guilty on October 28, 1968, was passed by the legislature on January 30, 1969, just 11 days prior to the date upon which he was to be sentenced. The law did not become effective until May 13, 1969, some two months later. Defendant conveniently left the State and disappeared until after May 13, 1969. He conveniently reappeared thereafter and presented himself for sentence on September 25, 1969, and was assessed the penalty extant at the time he *383committed the offense. He was hardly depedicnlated at the prison, when on October 16, 1969, he petitioned the court for release under statute. The trial court turned him down. Now we accommodate him.
Now, let’s take the case of John Richard Mark Miller, of State v. Miller, 24 Utah 2d 1, 464 P.2d 844 (1970), — the case which I thought was and think should be controlling here. Mr. Miller, apparently a criminal with an honor unpossessed by Belt, showed up for sentence on an identical same charge, in compliance with the court’s order, — and on time, — April 7, 1969, two months after the law was passed, but only one month before it became effective. He was sentenced on that date and can be made to serve up to 14 years in state prison under the statute that existed at the same time he and Belt committed the same crime, and in virtue of the decision here, — while Belt, by his own unlawful escape from the State and his deliberate violation of his probation, has a maximum obligation to serve but six months in a county jail. Any lawyer worth his salt could have obtained five or six weeks continuance for the purpose of sentencing Miller, — or Miller could have done it the easy, effective way condoned by this court by defying the law and bolting as did Belt, — in which event he now would be free as a bird under this decision.
This is the type of case a citizen simply cannot comprehend, — one the like of which provoked a person of pronounced prominence once to remark, on being queried about a case, that: “If that’s the law the law is an ass !”
If Belt is the beneficiary of the changed penalty here, there is absolutely no sense or reason why Miller and every other inmate confined under the same charge should not be released instanter if they have served six months.
CALLISTER, C. J., concurs in the dissenting opinion of HENRIOD, J.