Court Opinion

ID: 9702703
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 23:21:22.298937+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:39.635336
License: Public Domain

HENDERSON, Justice
(dissenting).
I would sustain the ruling of the trial court to dismiss the Indictment as it is insufficient on its face. Simply put, the Indictment does not adequately apprise Goodroad of that of which he is accused. Further, it is simply inadequate, as framed, to enable him to plead an acquittal or conviction in bar of a future prosecution for the same (alleged) offense. The Indictment fails to specifically describe the instrument. Rather, it describes the instrument as “a written instrument of any kind.” It could be anything, i.e., a bill of lading, invoice, medical or drug prescription, draft, etc. Majority opinion would rely, in determining its sufficiency, by evidence provided in a discovery process. It is the instrument itself which must be examined. Goodroad has a right to plead double jeopardy, in the future, and this wholly insufficient Indictment compromises that right. State v. Bingen, 326 N.W.2d 99 (S.D.1982). The precise manner in which an indictment is drawn cannot be ignored. Accuracy is required so that a defendant may avoid proceedings which amount to double jeopardy. Sanabria v. United States, 437 U.S. 54, 98 S.Ct. 2170, 57 L.Ed.2d 43 (1978). “A written instrument of any kind,” as pleaded by the prosecution is not accurate; it is not specific; such an allegation, under United States v. Bailey, 444 U.S. 394, 100 S.Ct. 624, 62 L.Ed.2d 575 (1980), does not fairly apprise Goodroad of the charge against him, and is therefore defective. Russell v. United States, 369 U.S. 749, 82 S.Ct. 1038, 8 L.Ed.2d 240 (1962).
Our South Dakota Constitution (Art. VI, § 7) and both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution require that an accused be adequately apprised of the criminal charge. Said state constitutional provision mandates that the accused has the right to “demand the nature and cause of action against him.” Statutorily, SDCL 23A-6-4 requires, inter aha, that an indictment shall contain “the essential facts constituting the offense. ” “A written instrument of any kind” is not descriptive of the “essential facts.” The “cause of action” is tantamount to the “essential facts.”
Moreover, our South Dakota Constitution (Art. VI, § 9) and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution require that the indictment be described sufficient enough to permit an accused to plead an acquittal in bar of future prosecutions for the same offense. In my opinion, the Indictment is fatally deficient on its face. I cannot believe we are bettering constitutional law by this decision. It appears the majority writing draws upon evidence, during discovery, to justify the “sufficiency” of this Indictment. This Indictment violates SDCL 23A-8-2 because it does not describe a public offense. Based upon this statute, the majority’s rationale impugns this Court’s holding in State v. Schladweiler, 436 N.W.2d 851 (S.D.1989). In Schladweiler, we held that a trial court cannot inquire into the legality or sufficiency of the evidence upon which an indictment is based when it considers a dismissal under SDCL 23A-8-2. State v. Hoekstra, 286 N.W.2d 127 (S.D.1979). Thus, Circuit Judge Moses looked at the Indictment on its face and held that it was flawed, spiritually following Schladweiler, and not basing an opinion upon the sufficiency of the evidence.
Let us now engage in a form of logic which, for want of better terminology, we shall call the logic of “probable inference.” Reference is made to SDCL 23A-6-16:
*442Unavailability of instrument on indictment or information for forgery. When an instrument, which is the subject of an indictment or information for forgery, has been destroyed or withheld by the act or procurement of the defendant, and the fact of the destruction or withholding is alleged in the indictment or information and established during the trial, any misdescription of the instrument is immaterial. (Emphasis added.)
By probable inference and hopeful logic, it appears that the specific description of the instrument (the Indictment before us) is necessary and is material. Perforce, Issue II dissipates into legal infinity.
As the tear ducts secrete tears when one is moved with sorrow and the adrenal gland adrenaline stimulating us with energy, the brain secretes thoughts and ideas in the competing world of the thinkers. Thereby, a dissent is born and creativity lie. Need I remind the legal profession of the intellectual and glorious days of Justices Holmes and Brandéis? Their gifts, by dissenting opinions, were monumental to the growth of the law and the preservation of the constitutional rights of the citizens of this Republic.
Inalienable rights through law were early birthed, as declared in the Holy Bible. To be accurately informed of an offense, which otherwise could eliminate freedom, has a Biblical foundation:
When Paul of Tarsus, menaced by the mob, was brought for judgment before the Roman Governor Festus in Caesarea, he said:
For if I be an offender, or have committed anything worthy of death, I refuse not to die: but if there be none of these things whereof these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. CActs 25: xi)
The Governor agreed:
It is not the manner of the Romans to deliver any man to die, before that he which is accused have the accusers face to face, and have license to answer for himself concerning the crime laid against him. (Acts 25: xvi). (Emphasis supplied mine.)
Later, the Roman Governor, after requesting King Agrippa to hear Paul’s case, declared:
For it seemeth to me unreasonable to send a prisoner, and not withal’to signify the crimes laid against him. (Acts 25: xxvii).
From John Steinbeck, one of America’s greatest writers, are representative statements of belief and commitment, originating from Chapter 13 of his 1952 novel, East of Eden, and his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech in 1962.
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. It’s beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then— the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are bom *443in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is a danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preeiousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
In this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can, by inspection, destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
STEINBECK 687-89 (The Viking Press 1943).
Our profession faces a common enemy: Volume, time strictures. Are we seeking that “glory” to which Brother Steinbeck alludes? Computers, machine research. Volume and machines are upon us with full force, driving us in a forced direction. As in Steinbeck’s time, caught in a litigation explosion, we face the danger of a diminishment of creativity. Computers and machines, can they replace the “preciousness” which lie in the mind of man? Books, those golden keys which open the doors of knowledge, we are told by the forces of change, will fade away.
Like Steinbeck, I oppose the destruction of the free mind. Today, this mind seeks the protection of constitutional rights. If the decisions in our appellate courts are relegated to pushing a button, we shall have appellate automatons. And I would like to believe that the men and women in this profession will never forget the quality and number of their glories by the creativeness of their minds.