People v. State

— reversing the Indiana Court of Appeals to reinstate a criminal conviction for no good reason (as they also recently did in Barnes and Coleman).

The facts in Brenda Moore v. State were not in dispute:

The defendant had consumed two tall cans of beer at her sister’s house on the evening of December 5, 2008. A friend of the defendant’s brother asked for a ride to visit a friend. The defendant explained to him that she could not drive because she had been drinking but that he could drive her car if he had a license. The brother’s friend then drove the defendant’s car with the defendant riding as a front seat passenger. When an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Officer pulled over the car because the license plate light was not working, the officer determined that the driver did not have a valid driver’s license and that the defendant could not operate the vehicle because she was intoxicated.

She was convicted of Public Intoxication, which is defined by Indiana statute as being “in a public place or a place of public resort in a state of intoxication caused by the person’s use of alcohol or a controlled substance.” From the Supreme Court’s opinion:

Established precedent has long recognized that a person in a vehicle stopped along a highway is in a public place for purposes of the public intoxication statute.

. . .

The defendant’s principal argument is that her conviction “violates the spirit of the public intoxication statute, and the policy behind its enactment” because she caused no harm or annoyance and “adhered to the popular public service motto ‘Don’t drink and drive.'” She favors a policy that would “encourage persons who find themselves intoxicated to ride in a vehicle to a private place without fear of being prosecuted for a crime.”

Whether conduct proscribed by a criminal law should be excused under certain circumstances on grounds of public policy is a matter for legislative evaluation and statutory revision if appropriate. The judicial function is to apply the laws as enacted by the legislature. We decline the defendant’s request to reverse her conviction on public policy grounds.

(Citations omitted.)

But it was the court’s own “established precedent,” not the “laws as enacted by the legislature,” which supposedly “recognized” that a person inside a private vehicle is “in a public place.” And as the lone dissenter points out, other precedent and common sense supports a contrary conclusion. The majority offers no reason other than “because we said so” to justify its counter-intuitive insistence that a passenger inside of a closed private vehicle traveling along a highway is “in a public place” and should suffer criminal penalties merely because she’s intoxicated.

My prescription for what ails the Indiana Supreme Court and therefore the people of Indiana is a strong dose of Lysander Spooner:

Taking it for granted that it has now been shown that no rule of civil conduct, that is inconsistent with the natural rights of men, can be rightfully established by government, or consequently be made obligatory as law, either upon the people, or upon judicial tribunals ‑‑ let us now proceed to test the legality of slavery by those written constitutions of government, which judicial tribunals actually recognize as authoritative.

In making this examination, however, I shall not insist upon the principle of the preceding chapter, that there can be no law contrary to natural right; but shall admit, for the sake of the argument, that there may be such laws. I shall only claim that in the interpretation of all statutes and constitutions, the ordinary legal rules of interpretation be observed. The most important of these rules, and the one to which it will be necessary constantly to refer, is the one that all language must be construed “strictly” in favor of natural right.

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