Court Opinion

ID: 9788868
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 01:21:14.133111+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:43:23.046545
License: Public Domain

*596Justice COATS,
dissenting.
Although the majority holding today will have no effect on the length of the defendant’s sentence to incarceration, and it in no way prohibits the legislature from categorizing the inchoate acts included in this drug offense as extraordinary risk crimes by adding a few (in my opinion, extraneous) words, I feel compelled to take issue with the majority opinion, primarily for two distinct, but related, reasons. I object to the majority’s reliance on the concept of “plain meaning” with reference to its construction of this statute, and I also object to any construction of a statute ascribing to it different and irreconcilable meanings depending upon its effect in a given context. I therefore respectfully dissent.
While I count myself among the first to limit the meaning of a statute according to the language actually chosen by the legislature to express its intent, I nevertheless recognize that particular statutory language can sometimes be reasonably understood in more than one way. I consider it misleading to suggest, as I believe the majority does, that the language chosen by the legislature to proscribe and punish the range of conduct included in section 18-18-405(l)(a), is susceptible of but one reasonable interpretation and therefore has a “plain meaning.” Where a court must resort to the array of interpretative aids and justifications found in the majority’s explanation, to conclude that the meaning of a statute is “plain,” at least in my view, at best minimizes the responsibility of the court in assigning a meaning to that statute and at worst, obscures policy choices actually made and imposed by the court.
Even where statutory language is susceptible of more than -one reasonable understanding, however, I do not believe its meaning can vary in different classes of cases. Not five years ago, in part because of its more lenient effect on criminal defendants, this court construed this very proscriptive statute as creating a single, undifferentiated offense rather than “three separate categories of proscribed actions.” Maj. op. at 591; see People v. Abiodun, 111 P.3d 462 (Colo.2005). We there held that with the exception of possession for personal use, which is expressly distinguished from the continuum of all the other proscribed conduct by its classification as a less serious felony, “the defendant’s sentence required by the statute is in no way dependent upon the particular act or acts he is found to have committed.” Id. at 466. I do not believe the same language can be construed as “the creation of single crime” when that works to the advantage of the defendant but as the creation of “three separate categories” of offenses when that produces the more advantageous result for him.
Subsection (3.5) of the statute, which is designated “Unlawful distribution, manufacturing, dispensing, sale, or possession,” classifies as an extraordinary risk crime “[t]he felony offense of unlawfully manufacturing, dispensing, selling, distributing, or possessing with intent to unlawfully manufacture, dispense, sell, or distribute a controlled substance.” (emphasis added). This subsection specifies, as we recognized in Abiodun, that the litany of proscribed conduct, including the preparatory acts statutorily left undifferentiated from completed ones, creates a single offense, punishable by the penalty ranges prescribed for extraordinary risk crimes. It in no way purports to classify this offense as an extraordinary risk crime only when committed in specifically designated ways, but differs in its description from the title of the offense only by expressly excluding from “possession” the conduct already distinguished as a different and lesser offense in the body of the proscription.
Because we have construed the continuum of conduct, “the gravamen of which is preventing the unauthorized delivery of’ illegal drugs to someone else, as a single, undifferentiated offense and the statute itself punishes that “felony offense” as an extraordinary risk crime, I believe our prior holdings are irreconcilable with the majority’s current construction.
I therefore respectfully dissent.
I am authorized to state that Justice EID joins in this dissent.