Court Opinion

ID: 9793549
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:49:52.310264+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:05:59.903924
License: Public Domain

ROSSMAN, J.,
specially concurring.
As stated in the opinion written by Mr. Justice Warner, this case was decided May 14, 1952, and the announcement of our holding indicated that we would later give the reasons which prompted the decision. I cannot say that the well-written opinion of Mr. Justice Warner expresses the reasons which persuaded me, May 14, to believe that the circuit court’s decree was erroneous.
Portland’s charter provides that the council of that city, in adopting emergency ordinances, must “specify with distinctness the facts and reasons constituting such emergency.” When I concurred in the action taken May 14, I believed, and still do, that such a material distinction exists between civil and criminal measures that it may affect the specification by the council of “the facts and reasons constituting such emergency. ’ ’ Civil legislation which concerns an emergency may not reveal by its own phraseology the emergency with which it is intended to cope. Therefore, it may be necessary to append to the measure a clause which delineates the emergency. Upon the other hand, criminal legislation always deals with conduct which is so evil that the lawmaker is authorized, not only to prohibit it, but to prescribe penalties for those who engage in it. Thus, penal legislation sometimes deals with self-evident emergencies. If an act stated that cattle stealing had become prevalent and that the theft of cattle was, therefore, rendered a felony, one *187could readily infer from those terms themselves that the act was concerned with an emergency.
The ordinance under scrutiny states that punch-boards were in use in the city and that the council believed that their continued use was such an evil that it should be made a punishable offense. Going on, it prohibited the use of punchboards and declared that an emergency existed.
May 14, when I voted to reverse the circuit court, I believed that the facts which I have just reviewed constituted a specification of “the facts and reasons” which constituted the emergency. The latter was not expressed as well as good draftsmanship could have done, but, nevertheless, the specification constituted substantial compliance with the charter’s requirements. In short, I believe that when conduct is made penal by an emergency enactment and when the latter states that the conduct is being commonly employed, those recitals suffice to comply with the charter’s requirements. The above are the reasons which prompted my action.