Court Opinion

ID: 9791493
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:12:13.886603+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:36.613778
License: Public Domain

STEWART, Justice,
concurring:
T concur without reservation in Justice Russon’s opinion for the Court and write merely to offer several comments on the views expressed by Justice Zimmerman with respect to several important issues concerning writs of habeas corpus and their place in our law.
Justice Zimmerman refers to the public’s perception of “long-delayed habeas proceedings and the endless litigation they seem to produce.” I submit there is little evidence of “endless litigation” produced by habeas proceedings under current practice. It is quite true that a decade or more ago when this and other courts were grappling with the highly complex and extremely difficult issues in capital eases that had arisen under United States Supreme Court cases construing the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, there were a number of highly protracted habeas cases. The so-called “Hi-Fi killers” case was the most notable in Utah. In fact, many of the “long-delayed habeas proceedings and the endless litigation they produee[d]” referred to by Justice Zimmerman, occurred as a result of federal post-conviction relief law (usually referred to as federal habeas law) that came into effect only after all state proceedings had been exhausted. That era is, for all practical purposes, over. It is simply unreasonable to rely on the events of that era, and especially on federal post-conviction relief law, as a basis for finding any serious fault with state habe-as law.
More fundamental, however, is a general disregard by some for the function and the nature of the historic “Great Writ,” which has been established as a fundamental constitutional right and protected from legislative abrogation by Article I, section 5 of the Utah *260Constitution. See also art. VIII, §§ 3 & 5; Hurst v. Cook, 777 P.2d 1029, 1033-36 (Utah 1989). Clearly the writ of habeas corpus does indeed on occasion prolong criminal proceedings to some extent. But every right which the framers placed in the Constitution to protect individuals from injustice and abusive state power does exactly the same thing. Trials by jury lengthen the time required to try a case. The same is true concerning the privilege against self-incrimination, the right to the effective assistance of counsel, and the necessity of evidence showing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Criminal justice could be administered much more rapidly if such rights were not recognized and speed and efficiency were of overriding importance.
It is, of course, correct that habeas proceedings ordinarily occur after the conclusion of a trial, and in a very few cases actually prolong the underlying criminal proceeding. Nevertheless, the framers of the Utah Constitution clearly thought that price was not excessive given the fundamental liberty interest of not being imprisoned in violation of the Constitution. A writ of habeas corpus is a critical legal device for accomplishing that objective. It is, in fact, the only legal means of providing an innocent person the right of access to the courts for relief from a wrongful conviction once an appeal or the time for taking an appeal is concluded. Wrongful convictions, although rare, do occur for a variety of reasons. See, e.g., Hurst, 777 P.2d at 1036 n. 6. In recent years, DNA evidence has been used in a number of cases to prove conclusively that a prisoner who had spent many years in prison was not the person who had committed the crime of which he had been convicted. It is not correct that every person ever convicted of a crime was in fact guilty. Our system is, after all, human in origin and administration, and our means of ascertaining forensic truth is more limited in some situations than is generally assumed.
Justice Zimmerman suggests that “the remedy for the real problem ... is not a statute of limitation, but the candid recognition that the initial post-conviction proceeding is really part of the criminal trial and review process.” Without addressing this suggestion in detail, I respectfully submit that this proposition raises enormously complicated problems of practicality as well as far-reaching issues of constitutionality. In the end, such a proposition, if adopted, would have only a marginal advantage in very limited situations and would not truly solve the underlying question of when a person who has been convicted of a crime but might nonetheless be innocent should have access to the courts.
It is certainly correct that numerous habe-as petitions are filed that are on their face frivolous and a trial court should have, and in fact does have, the power to dismiss such petitions for being frivolous. See e.g., Dunn v. Cook, 791 P.2d 873, 875-76 (Utah 1990). Nevertheless, the fundamental interests of protecting life and liberty from error in judicial proceedings is so profound that appellate courts should not and must not defer to trial courts to the point where the weighty interests to be protected by the writ of habeas corpus are overlooked.