Court Opinion

ID: 9670352
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:19:22.384631+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:04.036315
License: Public Domain

HEFFERNAN, CHIEF JUSTICE
(concurring). I join in the opinion of the court but concur specially to respond to the dissent.
It may well be, as the dissent suggests, that the defendant in this case is in the hands of God. However, the responsibility for resolving the legal uncertainties left behind is squarely in the hands of this court. It is no answer to that responsibility to abdicate our judicial duty to another power. Indeed, it would be a violation of our oath to administer justice to do so.
We operate in a constitutional society, with a "wall of separation between church and state.”1 In this case, that wall fences us on the side of the living and charges us with responsibility for determining whether legal error was made in the trial of Daniel P. McDonald (McDonald). It is not his appeal which is moot, as the dissent would have it, but rather it is his death which is moot, because he did not take the potential errors of our justice system into the grave with him.
These potential errors remain behind to perplex and confound his relatives, friends, reputation, and the legal system. Indeed, an important point of the majority opinion is that these errors remain behind to worry society at large, because such important collateral matters as inheritance, insurance benefit distribution, and distribution of various property may wind *541up being conclusively determined without benefit of a review for error in the potentially controlling criminal action.2
For these reasons, I suggest that the dissent suffers from a lack of focus. This court seeks not to extend its grasp "from here to eternity,” but to discharge its duty in the here and now of civil society in order to unravel the potential legal problems caused by McDonald’s death pending appeal.

Thomas Jefferson, Reply to Messrs. Dodge et al., letter of January 1, 1802, collected in Padover, The Complete Jefferson, 518-19.

Further, the dissent’s point regarding the relevance of such collateral matters as inheritance to the facts of this case is unclear. Dissent, at 543-544. Does the dissent mean to imply that one rule should apply when collateral matters are at issue and another when collateral matters are not at issue? This would be tantamount to allowing or disallowing a right of appeal based on the identity of the victim — a novel approach which surely should be rejected.