Court Opinion

ID: 9617105
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:52:11.069385+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:04:05.979358
License: Public Domain

Finley, J.
(concurring in the result) — Clearly recognizing that matters seemingly reasonable, logical, and commonsensical to one individual may not appear so to another, it is my best judgment that the result reached in the majority opinion is the most reasonable, logical, and common-sense one. Furthermore, the opinion cites an abundance of cases, and emphasizes acceptable and persuasive principles or rules of statutory interpretation in support of its disposition of this appeal. This is, or it seems to me it should be, sufficient.
But, in addition, it particularly seems to me simply too farfetched to think that the governor of this state, the members of the senate and the house of representatives, who enacted the herein-involved 1955 statutory amendment, consciously noted — and furthermore, that each and every one of these public officials deliberately approved or intended — the use of the preposition of, in this statute in its technical possessive sense, and for the specific purpose of distinguishing and applying different legal sanctions as *669between (a) state prisoners incarcerated in county jails (owned by various counties) and (b) those state prisoners incarcerated in institutions such as the state penitentiary, owned by the state. If this assumption or analysis is valid, and I think it is, then it follows that the legislators who enacted the statute intended, as a matter of over-all social policy, to penalize all state criminal offenders who escape from a county jail, the state penitentiary, or other penal institutions in the state, whether owned or operated by the state, or otherwise.
In the instant case, without quibbling as to dictionary definitions of the preposition of, and without attempting to distinguish what was said or not said in certain court decisions about this grammatical midget or giant, as the case may have been in such decisions, and lastly, without attempting to rationalize pertinent but inconsistent rules of statutory interpretation, I would call “strike three” on appellant’s counsel and declare the state the winner of the series. Besides, as mentioned above, the result reached in the majority opinion just plain makes good sense, and therein I concur.