determining that legislation violated the separation of powers doctrine where it was “in operation and effect, a legislative command to the courts to open a judgment previously made final, and to substitute for that judgment a disposition of the matter in accordance with the subsequently expressed legislative will.”
How later courts described this case
- determining that legislation violated the separation of powers doctrine where it was “in operation and effect, a legislative command to the courts to open a judgment previously made final, and to substitute for that judgment a disposition of the matter in accordance with the subsequently expressed legislative will.”
- holding that a statute reducing sentences for marijuana possession “operated as a legislative impairment of existing final legal judgments,” while also noting “there is no power of pardon or commutation in the legislature and... the power is specifically and singularly granted to the executive branch”
- holding that “even though the legislature possesses the power to promulgate the substantive law, judicial judgments and decrees entered pursuant to those laws may not be affected by subsequent legislative changes after those judgments and decrees have become final”
- stating that, in Pennsylvania's tripartite government of equal, separate and autonomous branches, each branch acts as a check on the other, and the domain of the judiciary is to interpret, construe and apply the law
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
POMEROY, Justice,
concurring.
I join in the opinion of the Court, and add these few supplemental lines only to sharpen the focus of decision as I see it.
Obviously, the legislature had second thoughts about the severity of the punishment it had decreed for violation of the Drug, Device and Cosmetic Act of 1961, Act of September 26, 1961, P.L. 1664, § 4, 35 P.S. § 780-4 (1964), where that violation consisted of possession (not the sale or delivery) of the drug marijuana. By the Act of 1972, it reduced *275 the offense from a felony to a misdemeanor, with corresponding lessening of sentences. It is the attempt to make this amelioration of the offense applicable to offenders convicted under the prior law that is here in issue.
Unfortunately for appellants and others in like cases, their judgments of sentence had become final before enactment of the new law.
While the attempt of the General Assembly to rectify what it must have considered to be an inequitable punishment visited upon prior offenders is laudable, I agree with the Court that relief must come in some fashion other than mandatory resentencing and expunging from the criminal records the fact of conviction of a felony. The concept of the finality of judgments and the integrity of the judicial process would, I fear, be seriously jeopardized were the understandable effort of the legislature in this situation to be validated. Courts may sentence only for acts made criminal by the legislature and may do so only within limits set by the legislature. When, however, those steps are taken, they are judicial acts, and in my view may not be undone by the legislature because it has come to believe that its prior treatment of the offense was mistaken. *
This statement is not meant to implicate the pardoning power.