Court Opinion

ID: 9797959
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:33:11.968554+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:59:56.079124
License: Public Domain

KENNEDY, Judge (specially concurring). {32} I concur with Judge Sutin’s assessment of the utilitarian conundrum that produces a hair-trigger for imposing “near strict liability” based on no genuinely functional distinction between this victim and any other person. Then too, I utterly concur with Judge Fry that we must take the statute as we find it, and that as we find it here, it is clear and lenity does not apply. Besides, it was the former familial relationship out of which the fight here was born. Much consideration in cases like these also rests with the prosecutor, in whose discretion, following the dictates of justice, rests the power of obsta principiis in the face of a temptation to upgrade a simple brawl to a charge rooted in a legislative desire to protect families.