Court Opinion

ID: 9740690
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:40:22.486468+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:19.762938
License: Public Domain

Grant, J.,
concurring.
I concur fully in the majority opinion. Since at least 1893, defendants in this state appealing convictions under a municipal ordinance have known, or should have known, that if a defendant is to effectively appeal such a conviction, it is necessary to include a copy of the ordinance allegedly violated in the record presented to a reviewing court. Defendants generally know whether there is to be an appeal, and they bear the duty to present a record that may be reviewed properly in the area defendant wants reviewed.
In Perry v. State, 37 Neb. 623, 625, 56 N.W. 315, 316 (1893), we said:
It is true that before the plaintiffs in error could have been lawfully convicted there must have been introduced in *649evidence facts proving that they were inmates of a house of ill-fame, and there must have also been introduced a valid ordinance of the city of Columbus forbidding persons from being inmates of such houses. As a matter of fact none of these things may have been done, but every reasonable presumption will be indulged by this court in favor of the correctness of the judgment of the court below.
Ninety-nine years later, defendants still profess to be astonished and nonplussed by the application of the rule.
To change the rule now and require prosecutors in the numerous ordinance violation cases in this state to introduce in evidence the ordinance allegedly violated would probably give us 99 years of dismissal on appeal of practically all ordinance violation cases. Prosecutors would probably be concerned with encumbering the record in every noncontested ordinance violation case by introducing the pertinent ordinance on the chance that a conviction might possibly be appealed or the prosecutors would forget to do so.
If the procedure is now judicially changed, I assume that would even the score for 198 years — from one allegedly outrageous application of the law to one diametrically opposed.
It does not appear to me to be too much to require lawyers to follow a 99-year-old established procedural rule and to treat this appellate problem as having been settled under the doctrine of stare decisis et non quieta movere.
Boslaugh, J., joins in this concurrence.