Court Opinion

ID: 9428414
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:41.143024+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:13.263713
License: Public Domain

Justice Blackmun,
concurring in the judgment.
No one disputes that the State of Georgia can designate the crime of willful child abandonment a felony. It instead has chosen to make the crime a misdemeanor if confined within state boundaries, but a felony once abandonment is accompanied by departure from the State. Thus, in effect, the State requires an abandoning and nonsupporting parent to remain in Georgia if he or she wishes to avoid more serious criminal penalties. This burden on interstate travel applies even if the parent has no criminal intent when crossing the state line.
Given the Georgia statutory scheme, § 74-9902 (a) clearly penalizes appellee’s exercise of his constitutional right to travel. In my view, however, that penalty is justified by the State’s special interest in law enforcement in this context. The challenged criminal statute is concerned primarily with *428restitution rather than punishment, and the core criminal conduct, willful abandonment and continuing nonsupport, is markedly more difficult to redress once the offending parent leaves the jurisdiction. A restriction that reasonably discourages departure may therefore be justified as tailored to further the precise remedial objective of the criminal law. Significantly, however, the objective advanced here is not identical to the more general goal of improving the administration of criminal justice. The Court perhaps has this distinction in mind when it concludes, ante, at 422, that where departure “aggravates the consequences of conduct that is otherwise punishable,” it may merit enhanced punishment. I doubt that a State constitutionally may impose greater penalties for all crimes simply because the accused leaves the jurisdiction. To hold otherwise ignores the availability of summary interstate transfer procedures under the Extradition Clause, and chills unacceptably the travel rights of the presumptively innocent citizen.
For me, it also is noteworthy that appellee pleaded guilty to the crime of willful abandonment and subsequent departure from the State. The record gives no indication that appellee was anything but aware that his crime would become more serious once he left Georgia. Thus, the Court today need not decide the constitutionality of this statute as applied to a person of ordinary intelligence who had no knowledge, or reason to know, that the protected act of interstate travel would convert him . from a misdemeanant into a felon. Cf. Lambert v. California, 355 U. S. 225 (1957).
I concur in the judgment.