Court Opinion

ID: 9587311
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:20:56.604904+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:12.650877
License: Public Domain

*830URBIGKIT, Chief Justice,
concurring generally and with special concurrence.
I concur with the majority and join in the special concurrence of Justice Thomas. I write further to reflect that in spotlighted certainty for this bicentennial year, due process and equal protection, especially under the Wyoming Constitution, should not be unattained and the ephemeral rights not ever to be available to the average citizen. When faced with the inquiry “why not justice?”, I become dissatisfied by assumption that the legislature can amend those rights out of the Constitution for this or another special interest proposition.
Current history clearly reveals that reduction of rights available to the injured involves losses monumentally higher than benefits to the wrongdoer in reduced insurance premiums. Justice may be priced, but surely not in constitutional terms of loss of due process and equal protection.
I would even be more incensed by application of the principal of insulation from responsibility for fault-caused injury to be provided by the newest enactment, Wyo. Sess.Laws ch. 262 (1989), W.S. 9-2-1801 through 9-2-1812, when extended from the health care practitioners to some or all of the practitioners of abstracting, accountancy, architecture, attorneys-at-law, pawnbrokers, barbers, boxing exhibitors, podiatrists, chiropractors, collection agencies, cosmetologists, dance hall operators, debt adjusters, dentists, embalmers, hotel keepers, junk dealers, merchants-itinerants or temporary, nursing home administrators, optometrists, pharmacists, physicians, psychologists, real estate brokers, surveyors and engineers, veterinarians, warehouse-men and professional counsellors, and most recently augmented to include real estate appraisers-. W.S. 33-1-101 through 33-39-130, “Professions and Occupations.” 1
Strangely we omit educators, ministers, insurance agents and librarians by the accident of placement within the Wyoming statutes. Wyo.Sess.Laws ch. 262 (1989) is immeasurably worse than its predecessor, W.S. 9-2-1501 through 9-2-1511, Wyo. Sess.Laws ch. 92 (1986), which we declared unconstitutional in Hoem v. State, 756 P.2d 780 (Wyo.1988).
A justice system with the availability of effective jury inquiry is incomprehensibly preferable to idiomatic obstructions denying expeditious determination of fault and responsibility. Wyo. Const, art. 1, §§ 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 33, 34, 36 and art. 10, § 4.

. The demarcation for access to reduced justice delineated by W.S. 9-2-1803(a)(iii) of wrongdoers who had one year post secondary education does not add amelioration for my concern for applied due process or equal protection.