Court Opinion

ID: 9790033
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 01:45:23.292623+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:25.834451
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Justice
(dissenting).
I dissent for reasons I stated in Baine v. Beckstead and those stated by Mr. Justice Callister in the instant case.
I think this case and Baine v. Beckstead create a startling anomaly that permits a convicted person to use the benevolence of a judge to cast that same judge in the role of an accused, not a benefactor. The decision here, based on a denial of due process apparently will require as a. minimum that before a judge refuses to grant a further stay of execution, he must 1) give formal notice of his intention not to grant a further stay, 2) give the convicted person an opportunity to be represented by counsel, and 3) permit the cross-examination of the judge who befriended him.
Ordinarily denial of a stay of execution is prompted by confidential information received by the judge from the probation authorities, — information he must in all good conscience treat inviolate. Now he has two hopeless alternatives: 1) to betray that trust and divulge such information, thus most certainly drying up the sources of confidential information, or 2) to respect *241the confidential information by nondivul-gence, with the requirement imposed by these cases that he grant a further stay (for how long, the main opinion does not inform us, and no one else seems to venture a guess), with renewed claim of denial of due process at the expiration of each stay of execution, ad infinitum.
I think these cases are vehicles to carry the administration of criminal justice into a domain of uncertainty and absurdity. The new impedimenta which these cases place in the path of the trial judge makes hollow the language we have used in the past in characterizing him as having “sound discretion,” and it levels him to the position of having to defend himself to the convicted person whom he has befriended and tell him facts in order to prove that he is not being indiscreet in refusing to grant another stay.
The implication of these cases would seem to invest him who has been given a stay of execution, with the right to examine the confidential files of the probation authorities, and to unlock the top drawer files of the judge himself. Such results are almost incomprehensible in investigative and probationary areas relating to the administration of criminal justice.
The main opinion’s assertion that there is no merit in any suggestion that trial courts may deny stays of execution because of complications incident to the new procedure engendered by our present pronouncements, is an assertion without merit itself. Trial courts simply, honestly, conscientiously and statutorily may, after sentence, transfer the probationary phase of a case immediately to the Board of Pardons, by commitment. That agency may parole the convicted person as easily as the trial , court could place him on probation, — under the supervision of the same probationary authorities.
This writer, in suggesting such a development, does not show lack of confidence in the integrity of our courts, but ventures a confidence in the type of reaction they will harbor in being required to indulge an impractical procedure in administering their own cases in their own courts, subjecting them to cross-examination by, and explanation to a convicted cestui que trust, who absent such explanation, can now force his erstwhile trustee to deliver him a trust res to which initially he was not entitled.