Court Opinion

ID: 9527453
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:30:41.862169+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:25:48.111607
License: Public Domain

Mr. JUSTICE WEBBER, dissenting: I respectfully dissent and vehemently object to what in my opinion is an unwarranted and unwise extension of the per se conflict-of-interest rule. That rule, unless carefully controlled, will become nothing less than a Declaration of Indulgences to every criminal defendant who is dissatisfied with the result of his trial and appeal and seeks to fasten the blame upon his lawyer. In Smith, cited in the plurality opinion, the supreme court did nothing more than say that the trial court should have sustained the defendant’s objection. In fact, the court was careful to limit the decision to “the circumstances present here.” (Smith, 37 Ill. 2d 622,624,230 N.E.2d 169, 170.) In Slifer, distinguished in the plurality opinion, this court pointed out that the defendant first objected to the public defender and thereafter acquiesced in the appointment, in effect, withdrawing the objection. The cardinal premise, in my view, of both Smith and Slifer is that there is a burden on the defendant to take positive action of some kind, presumably an objection, at the time of appointment; he cannot in all fairness await the outcome and then lodge a retroactive plea of per se conflict. The proposition was put succinctly more than 300 years ago by John Locke in his Second Tract on Government: “As to the obligation of subjects, it must be understood that the power of the magistrate is on the one hand regulatory and on the other coercive, to which corresponds a double obligation, (i) the obligation to act, (ii) the obligation, if I may put it thus, to suffer; or, as it is commonly put, an active and a passive obedience.”1  The record in the case at bar is barren of any objection, or other action, by the defendant to indicate displeasure with his counsel, and this is true even though there was a full evidentiary hearing on the petition with the defendant presumably present. In this respect, it is quite unlike a hearing on a motion to dismiss which is generally held in the absence of the defendant and with the consequence that he has no opportunity to object. Moreover, the record is equally barren of any evidence that the successor public defender either (1) rejected out of hand all of the policies and actions of his predecessor, or (2) was ready to defend to the death each and every one of them. To say that one attorney will blindly adopt everything that another did is an assumption that flies in the face of human experience and the nature of lawyers. If it were true, Chief Justice Warren would simply have parrotted Chief Justice Hughes. Once the principle of the majority is accepted (i.e., that protecting the reputation of the office is of more importance than representing the client), the degrees admit of no limit. Any former public defender, any former State’s Attorney or any former assistant of either would be barred from areas of criminal practice. And what of a sitting judge who may have been a defender or prosecutor in the past? Will he be disqualified from hearing post-conviction petitions because of his former association? In the most frequently cited cases on the question of conflict of interest, that interest was apparent and real. (E.g., People v. Stoval (1968), 40 Ill. 2d 109, 239 N.E.2d 441 (attorney representing both defendant and victim); People v. Kester (1977), 66 Ill. 2d 162, 361 N.E.2d 569 (attorney acting as prosecutor and defender in the same case); People v. Coslet (1977), 67 Ill. 2d 127, 364 N.E.2d 67 (attorney representing both defendant and estate of victim-husband).) The purported conflict in the case at bar is far removed from these situations. In the absence of any objection and in the absence of any evidentiary record of conflict, I would not create one based on speculation. I would affirm the trial court.   In the Lockean context, “magistrate” refers either to the sovereign or to parliament — in short, the governing authority. However, the principle remains the same.