Court Opinion

ID: 9706345
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:41:12.491447+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:21.773788
License: Public Domain

CONCURRING AND DISSENTING OPINION BY
STEVENS, J.:
¶ 1 While I agree that we presently have jurisdiction under Pa.R.A.P. 311 to take the Commonwealth’s interlocutory appeal, I respectfully dissent from the majority’s opinion that defendant’s alleged conduct is not proscribed by 18 Pa.C.S. § 3302(b), “Risking Catastrophe.” Accordingly, I would vacate the order quashing the charge under Section 3302(b) and remand for trial.
¶ 2 In Commomvealth v. Hughes, 468 Pa. 502, 364 A.2d 306 (1976), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recognized that “[t]he ‘risk’ proscribed by [Section 3302(b) ] is the use of dangerous means by one who ‘consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk’ and thereby unnecessarily exposes society to an extraordinary disaster.” Hughes, 468 Pa. at 513, 364 A.2d at 311 (emphasis in original). Contrary to the majority’s opinion, the “dangerous means” pertinent to the present case is not “collapse of building” as enumerated in Section 3302(a), for it would be nonsensical, indeed, to argue that defendants were engaged in the deliberate employment of collapsing the pier when the pier, in fact, collapsed. The language pertinent to our inquiry is, instead, found elsewhere in Section 3302.
¶ 3 In addition to enumerating particular harmful or destructive forces and substances, Section 3302(a), “Causing catastrophe,” also generally proscribes “any other means of causing potentially widespread injury or damage.” Similarly, Section 3302(b), “Risking catastrophe,” makes it a felony to recklessly create a “risk of catastrophe in the employment of.. .other dangerous means listed in subsection (a).... ” In thus criminalizing the causing or risking of a catastrophe, Section 3302 does not claim to provide an exhaustive list of subject forces, substances, or means, but allows, instead, for reasonable discretion to assess whether other unenumerated forces, substances, or means also qualify for proscription.
¶ 4 The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has, at the least, implicitly recognized that the scope of Section 3302 must exceed the limit of its enumerated forces in order to serve the purpose sought to be accomplished by the statute. In Commonwealth v. Scatena, 508 Pa. 512, 498 A.2d 1314 (1985), a case involving vast contamination of the Susquehanna River from defendants’ practice of disposing industrial and chemical wastes into an abandoned mine shaft, the Court discussed the quantum of proof necessary to a Section 3302(b) charge. In eschewing a requirement for highly precise or technical evidence, the Court offered examples of dangerous means that would be commonly understood without expert testimony to qualify as a risk of catastrophe. One example stated:
When a school bus driver intentionally navigates his bus full of school children through a red light at a high rate of speed and miraculously escapes collision and injuries, no expert testimony is needed to establish that the driver is guilty of risking a catastrophe.
*480Scatena, 508 Pa. at 520, 498 A.2d at 1318. Section 3302 does not enumerate the operation of public transportation, yet the Court clearly considered such operation to be among “any other means of causing widespread injury or damage” under the statute, when done so recklessly. Like the enumerated acts, driving a school bus full of people is an act to be performed with special caution because of its potential for wide devastation.
¶ 5 So, too, must proprietors or business owners who invite large, densely clustered public crowds into their establishments manage those operations with special caution, lest widespread devastation occur. Fire, occupancy, and other codes applicable to such operations bespeak the inherent dangers of accommodating large, public crowds. Promoting and using a location known to be unsafe and possibly incapable of sustaining the great weight that a public gathering of revelers will predictably bring to bear on the location’s structure must be considered the means by which one risks a catastrophe.
¶ 6 Such means thus transcend merely “failing to prevent a catastrophe” as described in Section 3303, which, the majority itself acknowledges, is meant to punish those who “merely ignore a risk that is known” as compared to those who have “created the risk” in the first place. The present case is not one of simple neglect, ignorance, or abandonment of a hazardous structure that threatened to fail without curative intervention. Rather, it is one of having put a hazardous structure to use, of having employed that structure, in a dangerous manner and at the potential expense of human welfare for a profit. It was, therefore, the employment of the pier, not its stand-alone quality, that created the risk of harm and put the wheels of devastation in motion.
¶ 7 As can the struck match dropped on a flammable surface, the avalanche launched above a community, and the school bus full of children careening through a red light, a failing structure recklessly employed to accommodate a paying public can bring widespread devastation. Accordingly, I would find that the allegations here clearly make a case of felonious risk of catastrophe.