Court Opinion

ID: 9720585
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 08:36:55.85901+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:19.666708
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(concurring separately). My disagreement with the majority opinion is total. Resting *252upon what I regard as wholly unreal reasons, that opinion is pointed in the ultimate at retroactive banning of the regularly necessary confidential control by sentencing judges of presentence reports that are received by them. Despite contrary representations it is sure to provide yet another way by which the professional criminal may obtain still another “trial,” and still more “appellate review,” and still more outright releases when there can be no such additional “trial”; all nunc pro tunc as of the respective dates of his respective sentences for felony or felonies committed. *
Is there to be no end of this judicial dandling of convicts, each having been accorded an overflowing cup of due process of law and appellate review of right? For my part, I stand with the several judges of the Court of Appeals whose successive rulings negate what today’s majority would force upon a harried people’s already shackled effort to enforce their laws against crime. I stand also with the forcefully restraining letters we are receiving almost daily now — from veteran trial judges. Their practically experienced opposition to today’s proposed new rule of Court (see footnote 5, ante at p 250, 251) ought to persuade every Justice that the steadily needed cooperation of law-abiding citizens, inherent as it is in the principle and value of presentence investigation, will upon declared effect of proposed new Rule 785.4 be gone with the wind.
With the criminal encouraged as he now is, either by these ever-mounting technicalisms appellate courts are inventing or by longtime release on bail, few will care to risk his emboldened ire by providing *253presentence information when the court’s officer requests such information. Slowly but surely, all lawabiders are learning- that the judicial system is providing for them no protection from crime; that they must take care of themselves, their lives, their property, their all.
Adopting and applying that which Division 1 wrote to conclude its opinion, I would affirm. The conclusion thus adopted and applied reads (25 Mich App 195, 196):
“As to the second, this Court has ruled before on the availability of review of presentence reports. People v. Camak (1967), 5 Mich App 655; People v. Beard (1969), 17 Mich App 409; People v. Charles Williams (1969), 19 Mich App 544. Review of those reports is not of right, but within the sound discretion of the trial court. Defendant has not shown an abuse of that discretion in the instant case.”

 Consider the promise of prospectivity made by Cole (382 Mich 695, 720, 721) and its arrant repudiation 18 months later by Hampton (384 Mich 669).