Court Opinion

ID: 9706615
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:47:38.036934+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:41:27.537592
License: Public Domain

Connolly, J.,
concurring.
I concur in the result reached by the majority, but write separately to address issues raised by the dissent. The dissent ignores the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in United States v. Halper, 490 U.S. 435, 109 S. Ct. 1892, 104 L. Ed. 2d 487 (1989); rebukes the majority of this court for ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court; mischaracterizes the holding of the majority opinion in State v. Hansen, ante p. 177, 542 N.W.2d 424 (1996); and misconstrues the holdings of appellate courts from other jurisdictions. Consequently, I am compelled to respond.
The issue presented in this case, as in Hansen, is best articulated by the Court in Halper, which stated: “[T]he question we face today [is]: whether a civil sanction, in *545application, may be so divorced from any remedial goal that it constitutes ‘punishment’ for the purpose of double jeopardy analysis.” 490 U.S. at 443. The Halper Court went on to provide the general principle from which to resolve this issue by stating:
We therefore hold that under the Double Jeopardy Clause a defendant who already has been punished in a criminal prosection may not be subjected to an additional civil sanction to the extent that the second sanction may not fairly be characterized as remedial, but only as a deterrent or retribution.
(Emphasis supplied.) 490 U.S. at 448-49.
After applying Halper’s holding to the facts of Hansen, supra, this court found that substantial remedial purposes underlie Nebraska’s ALR statutes and concluded that its primary remedial character was not defeated by the fact that the statutes also play a secondary role in deterring others from driving drunk. As a result, we held that “the Double Jeopardy Clauses of the U.S. and Nebraska Constitutions do not bar prosecuting a motorist for DUI after the motorist’s driver’s license has been administratively revoked, because such revocation does not subject the offender to multiple punishment for the same offense.” Hansen, ante at 194, 542 N.W.2d at 435.
Despite Halper’s clear holding, the dissent focuses on a seemingly inconsistent passage within that opinion which states “a civil sanction that cannot fairly be said solely to serve a remedial purpose, but rather can only be explained as also serving either retributive or deterrent purposes, is punishment, as we have come to understand the term.” 490 U.S. at 448. The dissent asserts that this passage is the holding of Halper and that the majority of this court ignored the U.S. Supreme Court. I find such assertions troubling in light of the fact that the language the majority followed as precedent was deemed the “holding” by the Halper Court. (“We therefore hold . . . .” Id.)
Black’s Law Dictionary 731 (6th ed. 1990) defines “holding” as “[t]he legal principle to be drawn from the opinion (decision) of the court. Opposite of dictum . ...” It is the duty of this court to follow the holdings of the U.S. Supreme Court, which *546is, as the dissent points out, “the only legal authority in this nation empowered to bind this court.” Thus, if any “selective reading” or strategic ignoring of the U.S. Supreme Court has occurred, it was not done by the majority.
The dissent goes on to state that “[t]he selective reading of Halper endorsed by the majority might be easier to accept had the U.S. Supreme Court not resolved the question of which interpretation of Halper is correct in Austin v. United States, 509 U.S. 602, 113 S. Ct. 2801, 125 L. Ed. 2d 488 (1993).” However, the Austin Court did not proclaim that opinion to be a modification or reversal of Halper. Instead, it merely applied Halper’s dictum to the civil forfeiture context. In fact, the only cases cited by the dissent that applied Austin’s language were in the civil forfeiture context. As of this date, this court has not had the opportunity to determine whether civil forfeitures constitute punishment for purposes of double jeopardy. In any event, that issue is not in question in the instant case.
Interestingly, the dissent cites Doe v. Poritz, 142 N.J. 1, 662 A.2d 367 (1995), a case “considering [the] alleged deterrent impact of sex offender registration and community notification statutes,” for the proposition that “Austin clarifies Halper’s prohibition of punitive purposes in civil sanctions.” However, in Poritz the court found:
The contention . . . based on the language that initially appeared in Halper, that even the slightest deterrent consequence, whether intended or not, whether the inevitable consequence of remedial provisions or not, renders the statute or the sanction involved “punishment” is not borne out either by a careful reading of the language relied on or by the judicial analysis of the issue. Furthermore, the contention is not supported by the outcome in various cases where the claim of punishment is rejected despite some obvious deterrent impact.
(Emphasis supplied.) 142 N.J. at 60, 662 A.2d at 397.
Thus, it is obvious that Poritz does not stand for the proposition that Austin is a clarification of Halper as the dissent claims. To the contrary, Poritz provides significant support to State v. Hansen, ante p. 177, 542 N.W.2d 424 (1996). One of the cases referred to by the Poritz court was Department of *547Revenue of Montana v. Kurth Ranch, __ U.S. _, 114 S. Ct. 1937, 128 L. Ed. 2d 767 (1994). In Kurth Ranch, a case decided after Halper and Austin, the Court found the drug tax imposed to be excessive and thus punishment; however, it acknowledged that other types of nonpunitive sanctions could legitimately include deterrent aspects. (“We begin by noting that neither a high rate of taxation nor an obvious deterrent purpose automatically marks this tax a form of punishment.” 114 S. Ct. at 1946. “While a high tax rate and deterrent purpose lend support to the characterization of the drug tax as punishment, these features, in and of themselves, do not necessarily render the tax punitive.” (Emphasis supplied.) Id. at 1947.)
The dissent does not mention Kurth Ranch in its opinion because it refutes the dissent’s position that Austin was a clarification of Halper. If Austin was intended to be applicable outside the forfeiture context, the Court would not have subsequently stated in Kurth Ranch that an obvious deterrent purpose does not automatically mark a civil sanction a form of punishment.
The dissent mischaracterizes the holding of Hansen by asserting “[t]he majority in Hansen and this case, among other jurisdictions, adopted the [holding of Halper] and interpreted it to mean that a civil sanction must be only deterrent in nature, lacking any remedial aims, to qualify as punishment.”
The dissent implies that the majority interpreted Halper to mean that even if a statute has a primary punitive purpose, it would not qualify as punishment for purposes of double jeopardy so long as it has a secondary remedial purpose. However, in Hansen, we held “the fact that a statute designed primarily to serve remedial purposes secondarily serves the exemplary purpose of general deterrence as well does not necessitate the conclusion that the statute results in punishment for double jeopardy purposes.” Hansen, ante at 191, 542 N.W.2d at 434. If in fact the sanction had a primary punitive purpose, then clearly it would constitute punishment for purposes of double jeopardy.
Finally, the dissent misstates that all the courts which find ALR to be remedial “simply deny that any deterrent purpose exists in ALR.” It is obvious that the dissent did not carefully *548analyze these opinions. The courts that have dealt most convincingly with this problem have acknowledged that the revocation of a driver’s license based on the driver’s misconduct does have a deterrent aspect. Nevertheless, these courts have held that administrative license revocations remain “remedial” in nature. See, State v. Zerkel, 900 P.2d 744, 756 (Alaska App. 1995) (administrative revocation of driver’s license is remedial even though it may have a deterrent goal and may achieve some deterrent effect. “[I]t would be naive to suggest that the legislature did not hope to deter misconduct when it enacted the statutes .... But this deterrent purpose does not mean that administrative revocation of these licenses is ‘punishment’ for purposes of the double jeopardy clause”); State v. Savard, 659 A.2d 1265, 1268 (Me. 1995) (“we conclude that any punitive or deterrent purpose served by the suspension of an operator’s driver’s license following an arrest for [DUI] is merely incidental to the overriding purpose intended by the Legislature to provide the public with safe roadways”); State v. Strong, 158 Vt. 56, 61, 605 A.2d 510, 513 (1992) (“[although there is an element of deterrence to the summary suspension of an operator’s license, this element is present in any loss of license or privilege and is not the primary focus of [the] statutory scheme”); State v. Nichols, 169 Ariz. 409, 413, 819 P.2d 995, 999 (Ariz. App. 1991) (“[w]e acknowledge that [ALR] may serve an additional purpose of punishing the violator and perhaps deterring that individual as well as other drivers from driving while intoxicated. We do not believe, however, that because of this incidental effect, it ‘may not fairly be characterized as remedial’ ” (citing Halper, supra)). See, also, Butler v. Dept. of Public Safety & Corr., 609 So. 2d 790 (La. 1992).
Likewise, under our ALR statutes, any deterrent purpose served by the revocation of a driver’s license following an arrest for DUI is merely secondary to the overriding remedial purpose of providing the public with safe roadways. As a result, the Double Jeopardy Clauses of the U.S. and Nebraska Constitutions do not bar prosecuting a motorist for DUI after the motorist’s driver’s license has been administratively revoked because such revocation does not subject the offender to *549multiple punishment for the same offense.