Court Opinion

ID: 9670440
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:20:40.600059+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:04.507245
License: Public Domain

Peterson, Justice
(concurring specially).
I concur in the opinion of Mr. Justice Scott, writing for the majority of the court. I would add this word concerning our decision in State v. Boyce, 284 Minn. 242, 170 N. W. 2d 104 (1969), upon which the trial court relied in stating that “in this situation I think the interest of the Defendant would best be served by a jury trial.”
The comparative situation in Boyce and the instant case is such that the order of the trial court denying the request for a non jury trial is fully understandable. The central ingredient in both cases is the concern that a verdict of guilt or innocence not be infected by latent racial prejudice. The defendants in both cases were black. The deceased persons in both cases were white. The defendants in each case undertook to waive a jury trial; the waiver was allowed in' Boyce, denied in the instant case. A difference in the two cases was that in Boyce we had “grave doubts as to defendant’s guilt,” 284 Minn. 261, 170 N. W. 2d 116, whereas in the instant case there is no such apprehension.
The pointed suggestion in Boyce that the defendant, on a retrial, should “elect to submit the issues to a jury for decision rather than to waive his right to a jury trial” was neither casual nor “random.” The first numbered paragraph in the Boyce opin*227ion set the stage in these deliberate words (284 Minn. 253, 170 N. W. 2d 111):
“The determination of the trial court has support in the evidence. Whether this evidence should have been assessed by a jury notwithstanding defendant’s request for a nonjury trial, is another matter.”
The opinion thereafter concluded, as it had begun, with the quoted statement effectively advising the defendant not to waive a jury trial.
The defendant in Boyce providently accepted the advice of this court as to his best interests, for on retrial he was acquitted by a jury. The trial bench may well be confused were we now to hold in this case that a trial court’s denial of a request to waive a jury trial constitutes an abuse of judicial discretion.1

 I would not retreat from our considered dictum in Gaulke v. State, 289 Minn. 354, 184 N. W. 2d 599 (1971), but this is not, in my view, the extraordinary kind of case that we there contemplated as constitutionally overriding the applicable statute.