Court Opinion

ID: 9748673
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 16:09:43.243872+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:38.288465
License: Public Domain

RICHARD B. TEITELMAN, Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I fully concur with the principal opinion’s finding of plain error which requires reversal, but I respectfully dissent from its conclusion concerning the proper remedy on remand. We should remand for a new trial.
The principal opinion asserts that the highly unusual remedy it declares to be appropriate in this case is justified by “policy considerations.” Remand for a new trial is the remedy when a defendant on appeal is found to have been denied a fair trial. “Policy considerations” do not justify creating a new remedy and deviating from that conventional remedy in this case. The State profferred an egregiously flawed instruction. To then say that the remedy on appeal, once the State’s own error has required such a reversal, is the remedy adopted by the principal opinion, effectively allows the State to deny the defendant an opportunity for a fair, properly instructed jury trial.
As the principal opinion itself acknowledges, its remedy is indeed a “novel procedure,” one that has no precedential support under Missouri case law, and only scant support in a handful of reported cases from other jurisdictions. Among those cases, several are significantly distinguishable in that they involve only the penalty phase of a trial and not the jury verdict of guilt or acquittal.1 A few others appear to be essentially on point; however, I do not find those cases to be at all persuasive.2
No Missouri precedent supports the remedy adopted by the majority opinion. It relies on dictum from State v. O’Brien, 857 S.W.2d 212 (Mo. banc 1993), which suggested that when a conviction on a greater offense has been reversed for insufficiency of evidence, there may be instances where the remedy could be to “enter a conviction for a lesser offense if the evidence was sufficient for the jury to find each of the elements and the jury was required to find those elements to enter the ill-fated conviction on the greater of*419fense.” Id. at 220.3 The cited dictum in O’Brien, however, is distinguishable from the instant case. We do not have a sufficiency-of-evidence problem here, since there is no dispute that the State did at least make a submissible case on the element of intent to kill. Rather, this case involves serious instructional error that fundamentally denied Mr. Roe a fair trial. Further distinguishing this case from the decision in O’Brien, an insufficiency-of-evidence case would normally require, because of double jeopardy, a discharge (see State v. Montgomery, 591 S.W.2d 412, 415 (Mo.App. S.D.1979), whereas in the case at bar retrial is the remedy dictated by precedent.
The remedy that the majority adopts is not authorized by the Supreme Court Rules of Missouri. Rule 30.22 provides that when a judgment is reversed, we “shall direct a new trial or direct that the defendant be absolutely discharged or direct the trial court concerning further proceedings to be taken.” The rule plainly states that it is to be this Court, not the State, that chooses the remedy. The majority opinion delegates the decision to the State as to further proceedings.
I respectfully dissent from the principal opinion’s decision concerning the remedy upon remand. That remedy is unwise as a matter of law, unsupported by Missouri precedent, and unauthorized under Rule 30.22.

. This is true of State v. Douglas, 310 Or. 438, 800 P.2d 288, 294 (1990); Orndorff v. Lockhart, 906 F.2d 1230, 1233 (8 th Cir.1990); and Farmer v. State, 672 So.2d 639, 640 (Fla.App. 5 Dist.1996).

. In Oregon, for example, when the Boots case came back to that state’s Supreme Court for the second time, after having earlier been remanded on the basis of the same remedy adopted by the principal opinion herein, it provoked a passionate dissent by three of that Court’s judges. See State v. Boots, 315 Or. 572, 848 P.2d 76, 81-96 (1993) (dissent by Justices Peterson, Fadeley, and Chief Justice Carson). See also Lipinski v. State, 333 Md. 582, 636 A.2d 994, 998-99 (1994), where the court adopted this remedy only after an extended discussion of whether it was authorized under Maryland’s rules of criminal procedure, and even then only after conceding that there was "no appellate case in Maryland which followed the procedure ... nor is such procedure in widespread use in other jurisdictions.”

. The Court in O’Brien immediately followed this dictum by noting that no examples of this remedy could be found among Missouri cases; and there still are none.