Court Opinion

ID: 9626349
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 08:09:16.083026+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:00:16.628133
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Justice
(concurring).
I concur. The petition admittedly purports to be bottomed on evidence adduced incident to a previous petition for writ *40of habeas corpus filed by defendants in the United States District Court for Utah, which evidence we believe does not warrant any change of position by this court. That court claimed to have, and assumed jurisdiction of the matter. Such assumption of jurisdiction, we believe, is predicable only on the theory that defendants may have been denied constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The United States District Court heard the evidence presented to it, and if it had jurisdiction, as it claims, it very well could have granted or denied the petition. Why it did neither, but chose to permit this case to find haven again in this court by way of petition anew, is a matter of conjecture here and a matter of personal conviction there. In permitting and encouraging its voyage back to the Supreme Court of Utah, the Federal Court, in a judgment punctuated by opinion, has intimated strongly that else we do its bidding it quite assuredly will, creating the anomaly of two courts having concomitant jurisdiction, the one to survive a refusal of the other to agree.
The United States District Court may determine the nature and scope of its own jurisdiction and the matter of its own responsibility to both the defendants and the citizens of Utah. In so stating, an erroneous public impression, apparently conceived, gestated, delivered and nurtured by this case, to the effect that the United States District Court for Utah is some sort of appellate tribunal to which an appeal can be taken from the Supreme Court of Utah should be corrected. The Federal District Court has no such jurisdiction but is an inferior court in the Federal system, from which an appeal may be taken to the Circuit and Supreme Courts of the United States.
The petition and record accompanying it disclose nothing new of substance that would make imperative any change in the conclusion that these defendants have been accorded due process, have had a fair trial under our American and State systems and have not been denied any constitutional *41rights under either. Nothing in the record seems to convince that there has evolved anything substantially new that was not or could not have been presented at the jury trial, where the defendants, the writer believes, were represented by able and competent counsel, despite the veiled innuendo found in the record to the contrary. The judgment and opinion of the United States District Court, made a part of the record here, seems to accept as gospel the testimony of the defendants, confessed killers, who years after the admitted homicide, now for the first time testify to certain purported facts not heretofore divulged, albeit, as divulged, remain unconvincing as a basis for exculpation under a claim of denial of due process.
Two learned professors of law, appointed by the United States District Court, as its friends and advisers, after careful consideration, decided as we do, that defendants had been accorded due process of law. Apparently the Supreme Court of the United States also shares our view and that of the professors, since it refused to review this case on appeal from the Utah Supreme Court, where the very issue here —a claimed denial of constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, was before it there. It is no answer to say that in refusing to hear such appeal, the United States Supreme Court decided nothing by way of affirming our decision, since that high court treats not lightly the meritorious or convincing claim of a citizen of these United States that he has been denied inalienable and fundamental human rights guaranteed him under the Constitution. If defendants’ protestations reasonably had been substantiated by the record before the United States Supreme Court, or had indicated even a possible invasion of Constitutional rights, I believe that high tribunal quickly and quite earnestly would have entertained jurisdiction to determine whether it would grant the relief prayed, else the members of the court would have treated more lightly the oaths they took than did they the rights of defendants.
*42Significant it is that nowhere in this case can be found an intimation that these defendants ever repudiated their confessions to the effect that, robbery intended, each deliberately fired shots into the body of a respected, law-abiding citizen. It is equally significant that no competent authority has been cited that, based on the record of this case, would justify the liberation, by habeas corpus or otherwise, of these confessed slayers.
We are jealous of the rights of all accused persons, but we are quite as jealous of the rights of the law-abiding citizen, including the right to be secure in his home and in his business, free from felonious intrusion by persons armed and bent on robbery, possessed of a willingness to gain their ends at the expense of terminating human life in cold blood.