Court Opinion

ID: 9736226
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:47:54.411613+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:27:05.158519
License: Public Domain

ZAPPALA, Justice,
dissenting.
I dissent. The Commonwealth’s right to appeal a pre-trial order granting suppression, an order which would ordinarily be unappealable because interlocutory, is based on the asserted final character of the order. Although the order remains an interlocutory order, it is deemed to be final for purposes of appeal by the Commonwealth because its result is to terminate the prosecution or to effectively terminate the prosecution by substantially handicapping it. Commonwealth v. Bosurgi, 411 Pa. 56, 190 A.2d 304 (1963). In my judgment, if the Commonwealth proceeds to trial after a suppression order has been entered, it has implicitly acknowledged that the prosecution is neither terminated nor substantially handicapped. Accordingly, the interlocutory order lacks sufficient finality to be appealable. While a mistrial for manifest necessity may be like no trial at all for double jeopardy and some other purposes,1 the election to *537proceed to trial nevertheless stands as a tangible declaration by the Commonwealth that the suppression order neither requires it to terminate the prosecution nor substantially handicaps it in going forward with the prosecution. Having advanced to the next stage of the proceeding on the assumption that the suppression order did not handicap the prosecution so substantially as to prevent that advance, the Commonwealth should not be permitted to retreat, reassess its judgment, and simply have that reassessment govern the appealability of the order.

. The Majority's statement that "[s]ince a mistrial for manifest necessity does not bar reprosecution, the status of the case is as though trial never occurred and places the matter in a pre-trial context,” Majority Opinion at 531, is so general as to be valueless for purposes of supporting any rule relevant to the decision of this case. This generality is borne out by the cases cited as standing for the proposition, a curious amalgam of both civil and criminal cases in which, more often than not, the question decided bore little or no relation to the issue of the status of the case after mistrial.