Court Opinion

ID: 9696064
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:34:51.725867+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:17.997381
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno :
The Majority Opinion says: “Defendant also complains of the District Attorney’s bringing out the criminal past of his witnesses and of his cross-examining defendant about his own. We see no reason to nullify a prosecutor’s manoeuvre in anticipating what he may be sure defense counsel will bring out. This is not impeaching counsel’s own witness but rather the legitimate thrust and riposte of trial tactics.”
The practice which the Majority cavalierly approves as “legitimate thrust and riposte of trial tactics” is something more serious than what the Majority says it is. The prosecutor’s actions were not “thrust and riposte of trial tacts”, but thrust and twisting of the dagger in the vitals of a solemn Act of the Legislature which specifically says that: “Hereafter any person charged with crime and called as a witness in his own behalf, shall not be asked, and if asked shall not be required to answer, any questions tending to show that he has committed or, been charged with, or been convicted of any offense other than the one wherewith he shall then be charged, or tending to show that he has been of bad character or reputation. . .” (Act of May 15, 1911, P.L. 20).
The Majority Opinion says that the prosecuting Attorney has the right to manoeuvre so as to anticipate “what he may be sure defense counsel will bring out.” There is nothing in the law which says that prosecution counsel may anticipate what defense counsel will bring out, and certainly nothing which assigns to him clairvoyant powers which enable him to predict what defense counsel will do and say. But even if he had a crystal bowl on his table and possessed the supernatural powers which the Majority so freely assigns to every *54prosecuting attorney, he still would have no right to do what the law specifically says he must not do!
The Majority also blithely ignores what this Court emphatically stated as recently as May 8, 1959, in the case of Commonwealth v. Davis, 396 Pa. 158: “These continuous and persistent references during cross-examination to defendant’s past cannot be justified on any ‘credibility attack’ theory. The prosecuting attorney’s cross-examination served as a convenient sounding board upon which was echoed and re-echoed the fact that defendant had a criminal record and could not have failed to create a prejudice against defendant in the minds of the jury.”
Another serious matter was presented in this case which the Majority assumes to be of trifling consequence. The Majority says: “Special reference is made to Popovich’s testifying to what Ann Garrison said to him in the tavern about a prowl job. In this and other matters we think that trial counsel did a good journeyman’s job and achieved both inherent and comparable justice. The challenged evidence was conversation between co-conspirators during the conspiracy, which is an exception to the hearsay rule and admissible.”
Whether trial counsel did a good journeyman’s job (and achieved “both inherent and comparable justice,” whatever that may be) is not the issue. The issue is whether the Commonwealth should be permitted to introduce evidence against the defendant from the mouth of the wife of the defendant, in defiance of a statute of the Commonwealth which specifically prohibits that very thing. The Act of May 23, 1887, P.L. 158, specifically mandates: “Nor shall husband and wife be competent or permitted to testify against each other.” This inhibition is not limited to declarations in court but applies to declarations of all kinds. Wig-more says in his treatise on Evidence, 3rd Edition, *55§2232: “Extrajudicial admissions are a sort of testimony; hence [the prohibition of the act applies to them with the same force as though made by a spouse from the stand]. That which is privileged is testimony in any form, by the wife or husband against the other.”
That the defendant in this case may not be a model citizen is not for this Court to pass upon. Every decision rendered by this Court becomes a pier for the bridge over which future defendants must pass. To the extent that that bridge is weakened by a bad decision, to that extent an innocent person in the future may plunge through the bridge into the sea of unjust conviction, degradation, shame and disaster.
I dissent.