Court Opinion

ID: 9652485
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:24:39.712605+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:51.796665
License: Public Domain

dissenting.
I dissent. The majority makes the exercise of prosecutional discretion in refusing to prosecute justiciable. That is error in my opinion. Long ago, this Court recognized that a district attorney’s power to approve or disapprove private criminal complaints is consistent with that office’s unreviewable authority to initiate or discontinue prosecutions generally. Commonwealth v. Ragone, 317 Pa. 113, 176 A. 454 (1935). Pa.R.Crim.P. 133 protects the interests of the private complainant (often times, the victim) by allowing for the submission of a disapproved private complaint to a trial judge whose independent review checks and balances the district attorney’s decision and further hedges against possible error. At least, that is the theory behind the adoption of Rule 133 as set out in the A.B.A. Project on Standards for Criminal Justice, Standards Relating to the Prosecution Function and the Defense Function, § 3.4 (and the comments thereto) (Approved Draft, 1971), upon which the Rule was based. History, logic and efficiency require that this limitation on a prosecutor’s discretion must be read as narrowly as possible lest we make the already overburdened criminal justice system wholly impossible to administer. Read in that light, I am convinced that a trial judge’s decision to agree with a district attorney’s judgment not to prosecute is unreviewable and, for the reason that, *214inter alia, the private complainant has no standing to appeal. In his dissent in In Re Wood, 333 Pa.Superior Ct. 597, 482 A.2d 1033 (1984), Judge Del Sole put it this way, correctly in my opinion:
Pa.R.Crim.P. 133(B) gives a victim-complainant the right to seek approval from the Court of Common Pleas of a private criminal complaint which has been disapproved by the district attorney. However, that rule of court does not make the victim-complainant a party to the action. Criminal prosecutions are not to settle private grievances, but are to rectify the injury done to the Commonwealth. The individual who is the victim of a crime only has recourse to a civil action for damages____ The Court in [Commonwealth v.] Malloy [, 304 Pa.Superior Ct. 297, 450 A.2d 689 (1982),] cited with approval the language of the United States Supreme Court in Linda R.S. v. Richard D. & Texas, et al, 410 U.S. 614, 619, 93 S.Ct. 1146, 1149, 35 L.Ed.2d 536 (1973), that “... a citizen lacks standing to contest the policies of the prosecuting attorney when he himself is neither prosecuted nor threatened with prosecution ... (I)n American jurisprudence at least, a private citizen lacks a judicially cognizable interest in the prosecution or nonprosecution of another.”
The state is the party-plaintiff in a criminal prosecution. The victim-complainant is not a party to the proceeding. The victim acts only as a prosecuting witness, even in the case of a private criminal complaint____ Therefore, the victim-complainant has no standing to appeal from the disapproval of private criminal complaints____
482 A.2d at 1037. See also, Judge Cirillo’s dissent in Commonwealth v. Muroski, 352 Pa.Superior Ct. 15, 33, 506 A.2d 1312, 1323 (1986). I would expressly disapprove of the majority opinions in In Re Wood and Commonwealth v. Muroski, supra, to the opposite effect, as being unwise and contrary to law.
McDERMOTT, J., joins in this dissenting opinion.