Court Opinion

ID: 9864916
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 16:16:38.170142+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:32:37.325879
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Francis E. Bouck,
dissenting in part, but specially concurring.
In so far as the court’s opinion herein bases the affirmance upon the ground that the opinion in North River Ins. Co. v. Militello, 100 Colo. 343, 67 P. (2d) 625, stated “the law of the case” which was then — and is now again *31—before us, I concur. I heartily approve the return of this court to the reasonable and wholesome principle of “the law of the case,” which this court seemed deliberately to abandon in Black Diamond Co. v. Frank, 99 Colo. 528, 64 P. (2d) 797, as shown in the dissenting opinion at pages 533 and 799 respectively.
However, the right of this court to reconsider in any future unrelated case the effect which the department opinion in. the Militello case, supra, gave to the evidence of the criminal conviction, is, as I take it, fully reserved. Were the question an open one in the case at bar, I should under the disclosed circumstances hesitate to say that the defendant’s criminal conviction of arson beyond a reasonable doubt was not as a matter of law a determination of the unlawful burning charged by the insurance company in the civil case. I am inclined to believe that the criminal conviction which was had according to the law of the land — and as between the defendant Militello and all the people of the state of Colorado — should be accepted as conclusive and decisive for all purposes, in the absence of a. showing sufficient on recognized grounds to prove some illegality in the criminal verdict, a verdict which in the present instance was not so shown to have been illegal but was declared lawful by this court’s affirmance in Militello v. People, 95 Colo. 519, 37 P. (2d) 527.
The matter of establishing the general rule seems important enough to demand consideration by the court en banc at the earliest opportunity, when the argument is not, as here, that the selection of a certain rule in the particular case is binding because a party saw fit to urge in its brief and argument that this court could properly choose either of two out of several alternative rules obtaining in other jurisdictions. My concurrence is limited accordingly, and I dissent as to other matters which need not be discussed.