Court Opinion

ID: 9685566
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 14:48:17.699479+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:07.753440
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(concurring in remand)-. The majority opinion of Douglas v. California (1963), 372 US 353 (83 S Ct 814, 9 L Ed 2d 811) having been stretched and applied to Swenson v. Bosler (1967), 386 US 258 (87 S Ct 996, 18 L Ed 2d 33), I agree with Justice T. M. Kavanagh that we are bound here to apply the “even if” Swenson abstraction, appearing at p 260.
Considering the - impactive experience of seven years since Douglas was handed down, few experienced state court judges can or will gainsay Mr. Justice Clark’s trenchant dissent (Douglas at p 359):
“With this new fetish for indigency the Court piles an intolerable burden on the State’s judicial machinery. Indeed, if the Court is correct it may be that we should first clean up our own house. We have afforded indigent litigants much less protection than has California.”*
Reflect upon this McKinley case just as an example. Only for appellate services rendered thus far in this Court, and saying nothing of the expenses incurred and paid by Iosco county for professional representation of Mr. McKinley during the jury trial *542which resulted in his 1966 conviction, the county has been billed recently by appointed counsel for fees and costs aggregating $3,687.22, $1,000 of which has been paid. With the ever-mounting encouragement of Fourteenth Amendment appeals that is prevalent now, this profligate drain upon county and state treasuries can be stopped only by a constitutional, amendment barring civil and criminal appeals as of right; limiting them to such as are grantable upon application.
Such an amendment is both due and fair. It will provide for our state and its subdivisions no more than that same protection against frivolity and squander which insulates the United States Supreme Court. For unchallenged facts and statistics, see Mr. Justice Clark’s dissent aforesaid, pp 358, 359, 360.
The above said, I concur in remand as proposed.

 Every bit as forceful, dissenting Justices Harlan and Stewart endorsed this (Douglas at p 361):
“[I] am constrained to dissent from the implicit extension of the equal protection approach here — to a case in which the state denies no one- an appeal, but seeks only to keep within reasonable bounds the instances in which appellate counsel will be assigned to indigents.”