upheld law forbidding persons who have entered guilty pleas to certain offenses from holding public office
How later courts described this case
- upheld law forbidding persons who have entered guilty pleas to certain offenses from holding public office
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
OPALA, Justice,
dissenting.
I would reinstate the petitioners’ declaration of candidacy. The expungement orders in the petitioners’ criminal cases constitute an “accrued right” under Art. 5 § 54, Okl. Const., and are hence protected from change by after-enacted legislation. The legal effect of a judgment, civil or criminal, must be determined by the law in force when judgment is rendered. 1
There is another cogent constitutional ground for rejecting today’s challenge to the petitioners’ candidacy and for ordering their reinstatement on the ballot. Their legal disability to stand for election to a public office is claimed to be grounded in a statute passed after the criminal prosecutions against them already had been concluded without adversely affecting their civil rights. The disqualification sought to be imposed on them in the proceeding before us is not founded on judgments rendered in the criminal cases but on a later-enacted statute, 26 O.S.Supp.1986 § 5-105a, which is believed to alter the legal consequences of their previously expunged guilty pleas by attaching to them an attribute they clearly lacked under the law in force when the expungement orders came to be made — that of rendering a person ineligible for public office. 2 The disability-dealing provisions of the after-enacted statute are now invoked here to operate as the petitioners’ postexpungement resentenc-ing by an act of the legislature in plain violation of constitutional protection — both state and federal — against the passage of attainders. 3
*984 The fundamental law’s prohibition against attainders strikes at legislation that either pronounces or changes an individual’s judgment and sentence. The ex-pungement orders, by which the prosecutions against these petitioners came to be concluded, fall within the class of judicial dispositions protected against invasion by a bill of attainder. These orders cannot be changed by statute to revitalize an expunged plea of guilty — which is legally dead — and to make it the basis for disqualifying a person from holding a public office. A final order terminating a criminal case is subject neither to direct legislative modification nor to oblique statutory imposition of terms that are different from those pronounced by the court. In short, the terms of the expungement orders entered in petitioners’ cases must remain unmodified by statute. The petitioners’ pleas of guilty are expunged and inefficacious. The Attainder Clause protects these pleas from legislative resurrection.
I hence recede from the court’s refusal to reinstate the petitioners as candidates for election to a public office.
. Timmons v. Royal Globe Insurance Co., Okl., 713 P.2d 589, 594 [1985].
. 26 O.S.Supp.1986 § 5-105a.
. Art. 2 § 15, Okl. Const.; Art. 1 § 10, cl. 1, U.S. Const.; Okl. Alcoholic Beverage Control Board v. Seely, Okl., 621 P.2d 534, 538 [1980] (Opala, J., concurring in result) and Haley v. Okl. Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, Okl.App., 696 P.2d 1046, 1050 [1984].