Court Opinion

ID: 9431302
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:31:55.405085+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:16:52.636059
License: Public Domain

Justice Blackmun,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I join Parts I and II of the Court’s opinion, for I agree that the Court should refrain from addressing appellant’s challenge to the punitive damages awarded against it. I also agree with the Court’s conclusion that appellant’s challenge to Mississippi’s “penalty statute,” Miss. Code Ann. § 11-3-23 (Supp. 1987), is properly before the Court under its appellate jurisdiction. See 28 U. S. C. § 1257(2). Nonetheless, because I conclude that the statute cannot survive scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, I dissent from the Court’s conclusion to the contrary.
Section 11-3-23 “‘is in the nature of a penalty, or a condition of appeal.’” Pearce v. Ford Motor Co., 235 So. 2d 281, 283 (Miss. 1970), quoting Meek v. Alexander, 137 Miss. 117, 121, 102 So. 69, 70 (1924). Not all unsuccessful appellants, however, are subject to its penalizing effect. The statute imposes lump-sum “damages,” calculated at 15% of the value of the underlying judgment, on an appellant who unsuccessfully appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court a money judg*90ment or possessory action.1 Although the penalty applies to both the defendant and the prevailing but unsatisfied plaintiff who unsuccessfully appeals, it does not apply to the plaintiff who unsuccessfully appeals an adverse judgment or to the unsuccessful cross-appellant.
There can be little doubt that this damages assessment burdens the statutory right of a litigant to appeal a money judgment. The statute makes it substantially more expensive to exercise the right if the judgment is ultimately affirmed, and it thereby obviously creates a disincentive to appeal.2 The Court concludes that “the means chosen in § 11-3-23 are reasonably related to the achievement of the State’s objectives of discouraging frivolous appeals, compensating appellees for the intangible costs of litigation, and conserving judicial re*91sources.” Ante, at 85. In my view, the 15% automatic penalty provision is not at all “reasonably related” to any of these interests.3 To the contrary, the relationship of the statutory classification of a money-judgment appellant to the asserted governmental goals “is so attenuated as to render the distinction arbitrary [and] irrational.” Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., 473 U. S. 432, 446 (1985).
There is no rational relationship between the statute and the State’s asserted desire to compensate a prevailing appel-lee for “having endured the slings and arrows of successful appellate litigation,” Walters v. Inexco Oil Co., 440 So. 2d 268, 274-275 (Miss. 1983), whether the costs of that litigation are measured in economic or noneconomic terms. There is no reasonable justification for compensating only plaintiffs who prevail against an appeal. Defendants who have successfully defended in trial court against suits seeking money damages and who are subjected to appeals that prove unsuccessful are similarly burdened by the added emotional and financial costs of the appellate process. Yet, under the statute, they receive no “compensation” because the penalty is not imposed on nonprevailing plaintiffs who unsuccessfully appeal. The statute arbitrarily discriminates against defendant-appellants of money judgments, and the State offers no justification for the distinction so drawn.
Not surprisingly, then, the Court makes no attempt to justify § 11-3-23 based upon the “compensation” objective, despite its reference to that state interest. Instead, it upholds the penalty statute as reasonably related to Mississippi’s interest in discouraging frivolous appeals and thereby protecting the Mississippi Supreme Court “from being required to spend its time and energy and resources on appeals thoughtlessly taken.” Walters v. Inexco Oil Co., 440 So. 2d, at 275. See ante, at 81-82. In Lindsey v. Normet, 405 U. S. 56 *92(1972), the Court explained that a State might adopt “reasonable procedural provisions ... to discourage patently insubstantial appeals, if these rules are reasonably tailored to achieve these ends and if they are uniformly and non-discriminatorily applied.” Id., at 78. But §11-3-23 does not meet this standard. The penalty is neither applied in a uniform and nondiscriminatory manner, nor reasonably tailored to discourage “patently insubstantial appeals.”
Section 11-3-23 does not permit the Mississippi Supreme Court to determine whether an appeal is frivolous; the 15% penalty is imposed on certain unsuccessful appellants whenever the judgment is affirmed, regardless of the substantial merit of the appellant’s case. Thus, even if, as in this very case, a money judgment is affirmed by a narrow 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court, the assessment automatically is made. Such a provision obviously sweeps substantial appeals as well as frivolous appeals within its deterrent net.4
The claim that §11-3-23 operates to screen out frivolous appeals is no more persuasive than was the same claim advanced in Lindsey in support of the Oregon double-bond requirement. This Court found the argument “unpersuasive” in Lindsey because the Oregon requirement “bars nonfriv-olous appeals by those who are unable to post the bond but also allows meritless appeals by others who can afford the bond.” 405 U. S., at 78. Similarly, § 11-3-23 not only discourages nonfrivolous appeals by those who would avoid the risk of additional damages, but also allows meritless appeals by those who can afford to assume that risk. More strikingly, the statute allows an entirely frivolous' appeal by a *93nonprevailing plaintiff without the incursion of any risk of an appeal penalty. The Court provides no support for its con-clusory assertion that Mississippi rationally concluded that the group of litigants susceptible to the penalty are those “most likely to be deterred from bringing meritless claims.” Ante, at 84.
At bottom, the majority’s reasoning in sustaining Mississippi’s mandatory penalty statute amounts to an assessment that § 11-3-23 applies to a larger group of appellants and burdens their right to appeal less heavily than the statute struck down by the Court on equal protection grounds in Lindsey. See ante, at 83-85. But Lindsey is not the benchmark by which we measure the constitutionality of a discriminatory state statute burdening the right to appeal. Each such statute must be justified by reference to the governmental objectives it purportedly seeks to further. Mississippi has failed to demonstrate that § 11-3-23 is rationally related to its stated goals. The discrimination against appellants from money judgments is arbitrary and irrational. Accordingly, the judgment of the Mississippi Supreme Court denying appellant’s equal protection challenge to §11-3-23 should be reversed.
I dissent.

 Mississippi does not have an intermediate appellate court. Appeals are taken directly from the State’s 40 trial courts to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which has appellate jurisdiction over all matters originating in any of the trial courts, as well as those coming to the trial courts from numerous administrative agencies. See Brief for Mississippi Trial Lawyers Assn, as Amicus Curiae 4-5, and n. 4. Thus, “[e]very losing litigant is given an automatic right of appeal” to the Mississippi Supreme Court. Walters v. Inexco Oil Co., 440 So. 2d 268, 275 (Miss. 1983). That tribunal has observed that this “unfettered automatic right of appeal brings its own evils.” Ibid.

 The Court asserts that the 15% penalty is “a relatively modest additional assessment,” ante, at 84, when compared to the Oregon double-bond requirement for a defendant tenant, which the Court struck down in Lindsey v. Normet, 405 U. S. 56 (1972). This assertion is facile. Pursuant to § 11-3-23, the Mississippi Supreme Court imposed a mandatory $243,000 penalty against appellant in the instant case; this was in addition to extraordinary punitive damages. It is difficult to see the modesty in this imposition.
It is true that the Oregon statute at issue in Lindsey was more burdensome on the right to appeal in the sense that, by requiring that the bond be posted before an appeal was taken, it effectively foreclosed appeals to indigent defendants. See 405 U. S., at 79. But surely a penalty need not foreclose an appeal before it is recognized as burdensome. Cf. ibid, (disapproving the Oregon scheme because it raises the stakes of appealing an adverse judgment).

 Because I conclude that § 11-3-23 is not reasonably related to the state interests advanced in its defense, I need not address whether those interests are “legitimate” for purposes of equal protection analysis.

 The unnecessarily broad sweep of § 11-3-23 is illuminated by comparison to Mississippi Supreme Court Rule 38, adopted July 6, 1987, and effective January 1, 1988, which provides for sanctions for the taking of a frivolous appeal in any civil ease to which § 11-3-23 does not apply. It clearly reflects Mississippi’s recognition that frivolous appeals can be specifically identified, and further demonstrates the irrationality of distinguishing between appeals taken from money judgments and other appeals.