Court Opinion

ID: 9701734
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 22:34:49.112841+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:28.102426
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno :
The Highway Department of Pennsylvania has constructed at the taxpayers’ expense a concrete white elephant in Washington County. At an asserted cost of some |500,000 it widened into a glistening boulevard a little country road only a half mile long. The road is so short that it ends its journey before it can make up its mind where to go. In its brief travel it visits a woodland, a trailer camp and a few modest houses, the occupants of which were thoroughly satisfied with road conditions as they were.
This rural passageway, known as Oak Spring Road, was adequate for the sparse traffic it bore. I visited *359this pleasant little rustic lane before it was blown up into a white elephant and noted that, in a period of an hour and a half, only one automobile traversed its asphalt surface.
In January, 1966, the Highway Department filed in the Court of Common Pleas of Washington County a declaration of taking, in anticipation of the widening, grading and repaving of Oak Spring Road, plus some work contemplated on U. S. Route 19. On February 21, 1966, the Washington Park, Inc., owner of a shopping center, abutting on Route 19 and converging at a point where it intersects with Oak Spring Road, filed preliminary objections, averring that the Secretary of Highways of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was without power to condemn property owned by Washington Park because Article I, §10 of the Constitution of Pennsylvania provides that private property may be taken for public use alone, whereas the project involved in the declaration of taking here was launched for the purpose of benefiting a private property owner, namely, the Southgate Shopping Center, Inc., owning property on Oak Spring Road which it intended to develop into a shopping center.
The preliminary objections stated also that the declaration of taking was misleading in that it appeared therefrom that the Commonwealth proposed to improve all of Oak Spring Road, whereas in fact it intended to reconstruct only that portion of the road which would confer a commercial advantage to Southgate. Washington Park asserted further that an agreement entered into between the Department of Highways and Southgate revealed that the taking was for private property because Southgate, being the direct beneficiary of the contemplated operation, agreed to pay all damages resulting from the condemnation of the Washington Park property. It asserted, in addition, that the Commonwealth, through an improper delegation of *360sovereign authority, committed itself to appointing a special Commonwealth assistant attorney general to handle all proceedings relating to losses suffered by Washington Park.
The court of common pleas dismissed the preliminary objections and Washington Park appealed. While the appeal was pending, Washington Park applied to me for a supersedeas to halt the building of the road until this Court could hear the appeal and determine whether the serious averments of Washington Park had merit in law and in fact. It was apparent to me that unless the construction was halted, the Supreme Court would have nothing to pass on when the appeal would be heard in its September session, some two months hence. Washington Park averred that the construction contractors were working at top speed, including Saturdays, to complete the job so that it would be a fait accompli by the time the autumn leaves fell. Of course, it was as apparent to me as the sunrise, that, once the construction job was completed, the hearing before the Supreme Court would be an empty show, a hollow shout on the part of the attorneys, and the Court’s decision would be an adjudication in a vacuum. Indeed the whole appellate procedure would be mockery. It would be like litigating the tide which has gone out, the light of the moon in eclipse, or the ownership of a horse that has leaped over a mile-high cliff.
Nothing can be more important in law than preservation of the res, the thing in controversy, until the Court decides its fate. If this multiple-hundred-thousand-dollar road was constructed before the appeal was heard, the solid concrete of which it would be made could not be melted and minted into dollars to put back into the pockets of the taxpayers from which the money had been taken. The time to decide whether a road should or should not be constructed was before *361the steam shovels, bulldozers, and concrete mixers joined in a mighty welding operation to tie together in perpetual bond a solid structure that could never be reduced to its original elements again.
It also was quite clear to me that if the enterprise was not stopped and Washington Park should prevail in its appeal, its victory would be a Pyrrhic one, it would be gaining an empty well, a dry fountain, a breadless pantry, or the carcass of that horse that had jumped over the cliff.
Thus, on July 6, 1966, I granted the supersedeas. The Department of Highways ignored my order insofar as it appertained to Oak Spring Road. I called a hearing of the attorneys. Six appeared: Two for the Commonwealth, two from Washington Park, one for South Strabane Township (the site of Oak Spring Road) and the S. S. Kresge Company, a tenant of Washington Park. It developed at the hearing that no one would be inconvenienced nor would the business of South Strabane Township be interfered with, if all building operations on Oak Spring Road would cease until the legal matters in controversy would be decided by the Supreme Court. I, accordingly, reaffirmed my supersedeas and ordered the Highway Department to cease work on Oak Spring Road as well as on Route 19.
Now that everything was to be held in status quo, the remaining members of the Supreme Court, in a flagrant usurpation of power, overruled my supersedeas. The statute under which I had issued the supersedeas states specifically: “In appeals from judgments and decrees in mandamus, quo warranto, contested election cases, from sentences in criminal proceedings and all other classes of cases not herein otherwise provided for, the appeal shall not operate as a supersedeas, unless so ordered by the court below or the appellate court or any judge thereof either by general rule or *362special order, and upon sncli terms as may be required by the court or judge granting the order of supersedeas.” (Emphasis supplied)
I am a Justice of the Supreme Court and the other Justices had not a shadow of authority to interfere with a right conferred on me by the Legislature. The statute is a wise expression of the will of the people. Of what use can it be for any litigant to appeal to the highest court of our State if in the meantime the very object, which is in litigation, is demolished?
If the Highway Department was of the belief that Oak Spring Road should have been improved, it could have launched that improvement during the preceding three years, but, having waited three years, it certainly could have waited another two months so that the Supreme Court could determine whether the Department had the right to contract, in the manner it did, for the controverted construction.
The Majority said, at the time, that I could grant supersedeas only as to the 1200 square feet of the complainant’s property on Route 19, but it overlooked the undisputed fact that the whole construction project was one indivisible operation. The very heading of this case combines the construction on Oak Spring Road and the construction on Route 19 as one inseparable undertaking. The ease was heard in the court of common pleas on the proposition that the construction project was not divisible. The Highways Department acted on the basis that the improvements on Oak Spring Road and Route 19 were inseparable and indivisible. In view of the constant, unbroken indivisibility of the project, the Majority had no right, especially without any intimate knowledge of the situation, to divide the project. The Majority broke eggs without knowing whether they were chicken or turkey eggs. It declared that it would later, if necessary, unscramble the resulting omelet, knowing full well it could never unscramble it.
*363Every consideration of the situation demanded that the status quo be maintained until the appeal was heard.
When the Majority of the Court improperly interfered with the supersedeas I had issued, I filed a Dissenting Opinion in which I said: “I stand ready to sit with my colleagues to hear the appeal immediately so that this question so important to taxpayers and the community involved be adjudicated without delay and thus prevent the possibility that an illegal condemnation, an illegal taking, an illegal construction, and an illegal expenditure of taxpayers’ money be perpetuated without possibility of remedy or repair.
“No one is being harmed or can be harmed by the slight delay of a matter of two months until the appeal can be argued before the entire Court. The Majority is making this appeal impossible by ordering a destruction of the status quo. It is doing this not because it has the authority to do so, but in spite of the law which orders it not to do so. This is indeed a melancholy situation. The Majority is flouting statutory law, it is denying litigants due process, it is adjudicating without having an awareness of the facts, it is allowing the shoveling of taxpayers’ dollars into road ditches which may later prove to have been illegally excavated.”
As soon as my supersedeas was dissolved by the improper action of the Majority of this Court, the steam shovels, bulldozers, concrete mixers and all other road construction equipment went into high gear, and in a very short time, the short, modest Oak Spring Boad found itself attired in a glistening concrete dress, with nowhere to go. The taxpayers’ money was spent on this gala attire before there was an adjudication as to whether the money was authorized.
The appeal was finally heard and now the Majority has affirmed the action of the court below. It could *364not do otherwise. It would be folly to order the destruction of $500,000 worth of road building. The concrete cannot be liquified and transmuted into gold to put back into the State’s treasury.
Whether Southgate will now erect its shopping-center no one knows, but the fact remains that Washington Park was denied due process because its property right was physically destroyed when the supersedeas was dissolved. It went through the motions of an appeal but the argument was a useless procedure. Its attorneys were pouring water on a wheel which had no shaft, they were carrying empty sacks into a deserted flour mill, they were boarding a gangplank after the ship had left, they were rolling the stones of Sisyphus. The law looked on as the attorneys bolted and locked the door, knowing all the time that there was no horse in the barn; the attorneys were drinking from a jug without a bottom, the cannoneers were firing cannon that had no powder. It was all a vain and useless thing.
The refusal to grant supersedeas can result in irreparable tragedy. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two workingmen in Massachusetts, were sentenced to death after a trial admittedly saturated with error. As one of the attorneys in the ease I filed a petition for certiorari in the Supreme Court of the United States. The date of execution was set for August 22, 1927. The Supreme Court was not to meet until the following October. A stay of execution was imperative if the Supreme Court was to pass on living litigation. I applied to the Chief Justice and two Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, all of whom refused to grant the stay. I made application to the Governor of Massachusetts, he refused the stay. I turned to the President of the United States because by this time the Sacco-Vanzetti case had taken on international significance and the heads of many governments had in*365dicated they feared a great injustice would result if the two doomed workingmen went to the electric chair with half of the world believing them innocent. The President declined to intervene.
On August 22, 1927, the men, who were undoubtedly innocent, were executed. Two months later the Supreme Court met and one of the first items of its business was consideration of the pending petition for writ of certiorari, the one I had filed. The Court was formally advised that the petition was now moot because Sacco and Vanzetti were dead.
I believe it is a serious thing to refuse a supersedeas when, without it, the res may be destroyed, as it was in this case, when the bulldozers and concrete mixers went into action on the little Oak Spring Road in Washington County.