Court Opinion

ID: 9655505
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 19:12:52.201224+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:19.262454
License: Public Domain

WOLLMAN, Justice
(concurring specially)-
I write specially only to emphasize the fact that the state’s attorney specifically disavowed any claim that appellant should be punished for having exercised his constitutional right to a jury trial.
Following the state’s attorney’s opening statement at the sentencing hearing, appellant’s counsel responded in part by saying,
I’ve never heard of some defendant being punished because he takes his case to trial and I think that’s what Mr. Battey is trying to do in this case.
In rebuttal, the state’s attorney replied:
[L]est there be any misunderstanding, the State is not attempting to make the recommendation that it’s made in any way to punish the defendant for having gone to trial. The statement of counsel misses the whole point of the recommendation.
The state's attorney then went on to make the remainder of the statements quoted in the dissenting opinion herein.
It strikes me that if on the one hand we are going to say that the trial court followed the state’s attorney’s recommendation regarding the length of the sentence, then we must also credit the trial court with accepting the state’s attorney’s disavowal of any intention that appellant *152should be punished for exercising his constitutional right to a jury trial.
In State v. Carsten, 264 N.W.2d 707 (S.D.1978), we held that a trial court may properly take into consideration in imposing sentence its belief that the defendant testified untruthfully at trial. In reaching a similar result, the United States Supreme Court stated, “A defendant’s truthfulness or mendacity while testifying on his own behalf, almost without exception, has been deemed probative of his attitudes toward society and prospects for rehabilitation and hence relevant to sentencing.” United States v. Grayson, 438 U.S. 41, 50, 98 S.Ct. 2610, 2616, 57 L.Ed.2d 582, 590 (1978).
In responding to the defendant’s argument that the Court should fashion an exclusionary rule prohibiting trial courts from taking into account a defendant’s perjury in the sentencing process in order to preclude trial courts from using a defendant’s perjury for the impermissible purpose of punishing him for that perjury, the United States Supreme Court replied:
No rule of law, even one garbed in constitutional terms, can prevent improper use of firsthand observations of perjury. The integrity of the judges, and their fidelity to their oaths of office, necessarily provide the only, and in our view adequate, assurance against that.
Grayson, supra, 438 U.S. at 54, 98 S.Ct. at 2617, 57 L.Ed.2d at 592. I would apply the same analysis to the case before us. As the majority opinion points out, there is no evidence in the record to indicate that the trial court imposed the sentence it did to punish appellant for exercising his constitutional rights. Rather than to indulge in a presumption that our trial courts take into account impermissible considerations when imposing sentences, I would credit our trial judges with integrity and with fidelity to their oaths of office.
I have no doubt but that this court would quickly set aside a sentence imposed in violation of the principle that no defendant should be punished for exercising his constitutional rights, including the right to trial by jury, if the record should establish such a claim. This is not such a'case, however, and we should not attempt to read the record in such a way as to cast the case in such a posture.