Court Opinion

ID: 9733645
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 17:12:46.150931+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:42.865685
License: Public Domain

BROWN, J.
(concurring). I concur to briefly address the dissent. The United States Constitution forbids a defendant from being placed in jeopardy more than once for the same offense. U.S. Const, amend. V. However, it does not forbid the state from charging two or more courses of conduct arising out of the same event. Distinguishing between the two is the stuff of many appellate opinions.
The dissent reads the law to say that the test for solving the dilemma is limited to a single prong, i.e., whether the two charged offenses are identical in law *604and fact. If either the law or the facts are different, then the offenses are not the same and there is no double jeopardy problem.
The dissent rejects the two-prong test by reasoning that the "legislative intent prong" is not a "prong" at all, but an issue completely separate from one of constitutional double jeopardy. Courts need decide "legislative intent" only when a defendant claims that, as a matter of statutory interpretation, the legislature intended to allow just one unit of prosecution for a given statute.
Thus, the dissent concludes that unless a defendant launches a two-fisted attack on the allowable unit of prosecution, claiming not only that the multiple charges violated double jeopardy, but also that the legislature, as a matter of statutory intent, deigned to allow only a single unit of prosecution, then the court should not go beyond the "identity in law and fact" analysis.
In this case, because the defendant claimed that the two charges violated double jeopardy, but did not raise a statutory intent question, the dissent concluded that the majority is wrong to have gone into the legislative intent analysis.
I have three problems with the dissent. First, Sauceda does raise the "legislative intent" prong. He explicitly argues in his brief that "the Legislature clearly did not intend cumulative punishment under these two statutes."
Second, in State v. Tappa, 127 Wis. 2d 155, 378 N.W.2d 883 (1985), the supreme court admonished the court of appeals for failing to conduct the second prong of the multiplicity analysis, concluding that it was "erroneous not to apply the two-element test of [State v.] Rabe [, 96 Wis. 2d 48, 63, 291 N.W.2d 809, 816 (1980)]" to that case. Tappa, 127 Wis. 2d at 161, 378 N.W.2d at 885. The court of appeals, like the dissent in this case, *605had " consider[ed] legislative intent to be a separate question, unrelated to the constitutionally implicated multiplicity rule." Id. The Tappa court said that when a case presents a problem of "multiplicity," the two-prong test must be employed. The dissent is contrary to Tappa. I make further observation that I have reviewed the briefs in the Tappa case and construe Tappa's legislative intent argument to have been made in the constitutional sense, and not in the context of a separate nonconstitu-tional, statutory intent argument.
Third, while it is true that the legislature may fashion two or more separate crimes for a course of conduct, it escapes me as to how an analysis can be conducted without first determining the legislature's intent. The dissent seems to look at this whole question as one simple statutory interpretation problem and sees the multiplicity analysis as nothing more than a mine-run exercise in statutory construction. The reasoning goes something like this: we normally interpret the legislature's intent by reading within the four corners of the statute. If the statute is unambiguous, we do not look behind the statute to determine the legislative intent. If two statutes are not identical either in law or in fact, then it can be concluded that the legislature unambiguously meant for there to be two offenses and there is no need to look further.
I prefer to look at it another way. First, we look to see if the two crimes are identical in law or fact. If they are, then the question is ended and it is obvious that the prosecutor cannot issue multiple charges. If they are not, then we look further to the intent of the legislature to see whether the legislature intended multiple charges. I think this is the proper analysis. I believe this to be the analysis used by our supreme court. That is why I could not join the author of the dissent in this case. I also state *606that, upon examining the legislature's intent, I am persuaded by the reasoning of the lead opinion.