Court Opinion

ID: 9760040
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 00:39:19.15135+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:07.782256
License: Public Domain

Peters, J.
(dissenting). Because I believe that the conclusion this court reaches today is inconsistent with the rule of State v. Bell, 179 Conn. 98, 425 A.2d 574 (1979), I dissent.
*98In State v. Bell, as the majority opinion states, we acknowledged onr jurisdiction to review an order denying an application to be adjudicated a youthful offender pursuant to General Statutes §§ 54-76h, 54-76Z, and 54-76o. We there applied to a statutorily-created right the undisputed principle that interlocutory review, although disfavored, is available if an error in a challenged interlocutory ruling cannot be remedied by subsequent reversal of a conviction after trial. In Bell, the unremediable risk of error arose out of a youthful offender’s statutory right to a private hearing with sealed records. “Subsequent criminal proceedings, no matter what the eventual outcome, cannot regain for the defendant the privacy lost through the denial of Ms application and consequent public trial.” State v. Bell, supra, 99.
The statute establishing accelerated pretrial rehabilitation, General Statutes § 54-56e, conced-edly implicates no privacy rights. Instead, it offers, to qualified defendants, “a pretrial program” under wMch a qualified defendant “shall be released to the custody of the office of adult probation . . . under such conditions as the court shall order. . . . If such defendant satisfactorily completes his period of probation, he may apply for dismissal of the charges against him and the court, on finding such satisfactory completion, shall dismiss such charges.” As I read tMs statute, eligible defendants are given two separate and distinet rights: the right to a pretrial suspension of criminal proceedings and the right to dismissal of criminal charges upon successful completion of the stipulated period of probation. Although access to a probationary resolution of criminal charges can be restored after an erroneous conviction, I do not understand how access to pretrial suspension can ever be regained.
*99The majority opinion concludes that the accelerated rehabilitation statute, unlike the constitutional privilege against double jeopardy, does not create “a right not to be tried.” I take it that the majority does not deny the legislature the power to create such a right. We are then left with a question of statutory interpretation: having the power to do so, did the legislature, when it enacted the accelerated rehabilitation program, create a conditional right not to be tried? I believe that a program whose very purpose is a pretrial suspension of prosecution necessarily creates such a right. For that reason, I find distinguishable cases such as Prevedini v. Mobil Oil Corporation, 164 Conn. 287, 293-94, 320 A.2d 797 (1973), and Gores v. Rosenthal, 148 Conn. 218, 221, 169 A.2d 639 (1961), where we held interlocutory and unreviewable stays ancillary on the one hand to summary process proceedings and on the other to arbitration proceedings.
Nor am I persuaded that Heike v. United States, 217 U.S. 423, 30 S. Ct. 539, 54 L. Ed. 821 (1910), compels a different result. Heike determined only that Congress, in enacting the federal immunity statute, intended to create a shield from successful prosecution rather than a defense to prosecution itself. Nothing in Heike precludes a state legislature from evidencing a different and more sweeping intent. Furthermore, the purposes served by the federal immunity statute and the state accelerated rehabilitation program are clearly distinguishable. Whereas the federal statute is designed to encourage witnesses to cooperate with the judicial process, and necessarily entails some exposure to legal proceedings, the state statute is intended to bypass prosecutorial proceedings and to keep accelerated rehabilitation cases off the docket *100altogether. 16 H. R. Proc., Pt. 11, 1973 Sess., p. 5713. Finally, Heike’s precedential vitality is undermined, at least in part, by its reliance on rulings forbidding pretrial review of adjudication of double jeopardy claims. Heike v. United States, supra, 432-33. These rulings have been rejected by Abney v. United States, 431 U.S. 651, 662, 97 S. Ct. 2034, 52 L. Ed. 2d 651 (1977). Although, on its own facts, Heike has been recently reaffirmed; United States v. MacDonald, 435 U.S. 850, 860 n.7, 98 S. Ct. 1547, 56 L. Ed. 2d 18 (1978); the validity of Heihe’s broader implications is at least doubtful. United States v. Alessi, 544 F.2d 1139, 1151-52 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 960, 97 S. Ct. 384, 50 L. Ed. 2d 327 (1976).
The accelerated rehabilitation statute, because it, in contradistinction to other statutes, creates a pretrial right to suspension of criminal proceedings, permits an immediate interlocutory appeal. Like the defendant in State v. Bell, 179 Conn. 98, 99, 425 A.2d 574 (1979), this defendant cannot regain, through subsequent reversal of criminal proceedings, the statutory right “lost through the denial of his application and the consequent public trial.” On more traditional reasoning, the denial of accelerated rehabilitation also meets the test of a final judgment established in Gores v. Rosenthal, supra, and Prevedini v. Mobil Oil Corporation, supra. Under that test, a judgment is final if its effect is to conclude the rights of the appealing party so that further proceedings after the ruling cannot affect those rights. Further proceedings in a criminal trial, whose purpose is to determine whether the defendant has committed the crime with which he has been charged, cannot affect his right to a pretrial suspension of inquiry into guilt or inno*101cence. The accelerated rehabilitation program, because it substitutes a probationary period for a criminal proceeding, cannot logically be affected by the outcome of such a proceeding. Even if the defendant were successful in establishing his innocence, he would still have suffered the burden of the trial from which the statute offered him conditional shelter.
Since I would therefore adjudicate this appeal on its merits, I would have to reach the question of the propriety of the trial court’s order denying the defendant access to the program of accelerated rehabilitation. In the present circumstances, however, discussion of the merits would serve no useful purpose and might have undesirable implications for further review in the future. I therefore limit this dissent to the jurisdictional question.
In this opinion Healey, J., concurred.