holding that although a mandatory $100-per-day penalty scheme was not necessarily facially unconstitutional, the imposition of a $17,300 penalty under the statute was constitutionally excessive in that case, given the defendant’s lesser culpability and the possibility of an unmerited windfall to the plaintiff
How later courts described this case
- holding that although a mandatory $100-per-day penalty scheme was not necessarily facially unconstitutional, the imposition of a $17,300 penalty under the statute was constitutionally excessive in that case, given the defendant’s lesser culpability and the possibility of an unmerited windfall to the plaintiff
- concluding that a mandatory $100 per day penalty, as applied, violated due process where the total penalty imposed was confiscatory, “wholly disproportionate to any discernible and legitimate legislative goal, and . . . so clearly unfair that it [could not] be sustained”
- noting that civil penalties are “a means of securing obedience to statutes validly 6 enacted under the police power.”
- construing liberally party’s efforts at trial to raise a federal due process challenge
Written by the judges who cited it.
Distinguished
Distinguished by Starving Students, Inc. v. Department of Industrial Relations, 23 Cal. Rptr. 3d 583 (2005)
Morgan, supra, 22 Cal.3d 388, is readily distinguishable.
The opinion
NEWMAN, J., Concurring.
Article I, section 17 of. the California Constitution commands that “excessive fines” not be imposed. In my view those two words justify reversal of the judgment here. There is ample reason for concluding that the constitutional prohibition covers civil as well as criminal fines.
I do not read the opinions cited by the majority here (e.g., Western Air Lines, Younger, Jayhill, and Walsh) as harbingers of a disinterred substantive-due-process review. Because of article I, section 17 of the California Constitution such a review indeed seems inappropriate in this case. Since 1937 “the [United States Supreme] Court’s abandonment of *408 ‘substantive due process’ review over economic regulation has been constant and unequivocal.” Freund et al., Constitutional Law (4th ed. 1977) page 1094.