Court Opinion

ID: 9614388
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:25:02.175305+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:36.202394
License: Public Domain

WALTERS, Justice (dissenting). I categorically dissent for all the reasons of inequality and arbitrariness stated by Justice Sosa and by me in our specially concurring opinions in State v. Compton, 104 N.M. 683, 726 P.2d 837 (1986). Compton and this case have blurred beyond discernment any distinction between culpability and degree of punishment. I have no quarrel with the legislature’s provision for a more severe sentence for attacking or murdering a police officer. I have an adamant aversion to providing for a more severe sentence for commission of a crime against a specific kind of victim that, because of frequently deliberately concealed and disguised activity of undercover police officers or for any other reasons, the accused has absolutely no awareness that he is committing. Comparison is invited between this and the Compton cases and the pronouncements of this Court for a hundred years concerning the doctrine of sentencing according to heinousness of the crime and the depravity of the actor’s mind. See, e.g., the discussion in Territory v. Pridemore, 4 N.M. (Gild.) 275, 13 P. 96 (1887). So dies in New Mexico in February 1986 another basic and, heretofore, solemn principle of American jurisprudence. See N.M. Const. art. II, § 18. SOSA, Senior Justice, concurs with Justice WALTERS and joins in her dissent.