Court Opinion

ID: 9753198
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 19:03:08.034771+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:32.005938
License: Public Domain

*614Chief Justice CASTILLE,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent, and I am in favor of dismissing this appeal as having been improvidently granted. I recognize that there are cases where error correction by this Court serves a salutary supervisory purpose, cases where even though the decision below was unpublished, the jurisprudential error or misapplication of the law is serious enough to warrant this Court’s involvement. However, I see very little point in this Court’s taking up fact-bound cases such as this, involving settled law applied in an unpublished memorandum decision below, and conducting a second round of error review. The Superior Court’s approach here was within the realm of reasonable application of the settled precedent and I would leave that court to its error-reviewing task. The tendency, when this Court conducts mere error review, is to exaggerate the perceived mistake below and to make it appear more than it is. Here, it is not even as if the panel flatly and erroneously ignored or misapplied the governing standard. More importantly, there is no suggestion of a broader pattern of the Superior Court’s repeated misapprehension or misinterpretation of settled law in this area. Four respected, competent judges below reviewed this issue and all four determined that the warrant was infirm, and that should be good enough, even though other judges might have weighed the same evidence differently. Absent some broader issue of statewide importance, the existing review is sufficient. Hence, I respectfully dissent.
Justices TODD and ORIE MELVIN join the opinion.