Capriglione v. State
| Docket Number | 138, 2021 |
| Decision Date | 01 October 2021 |
| Citation | 279 A.3d 803 |
| Parties | Michael CAPRIGLIONE, Respondent Below, Appellant, v. STATE of Delaware, EX REL. Kathleen JENNINGS, Attorney General, Petitioner Below, Appellee. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Court of Delaware |
Stephani J. Ballard, Esquire, LAW OFFICES OF STEPHANI J. BALLARD, LLC, Wilmington, Delaware, for Appellant Michael Capriglione.
David C. Skoranski, Esquire, DELAWARE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Wilmington, Delaware, for Appellee State of Delaware.
Before SEITZ, Chief Justice; VALIHURA, VAUGHN, TRAYNOR, and MONTGOMERY-REEVES, Justices, constituting the Court en banc.
On April 5, 2021, Michael Capriglione was elected to a two-year term as a Commissioner of the Town of Newport. On the eve of his swearing-in ceremony, the Attorney General, on behalf of the State of Delaware, petitioned for a writ of quo warranto in the Superior Court. The State contended that Capriglione was prohibited from serving as a Commissioner because he had been convicted of misdemeanor official misconduct for actions he took as Newport's police chief in 2018. That offense, the State argued, was a disqualifying "infamous crime" under Art. II, § 21 ("Section 21") of the Delaware Constitution. The Superior Court stayed Capriglione's swearing in to resolve this question and eventually held that he was constitutionally barred from holding public office.
We considered Capriglione's appeal on an expedited basis, hearing oral argument on July 14, 2021. On July 16, we issued an order reversing the Superior Court and allowing Capriglione to take the oath of office.1 In this opinion, we explain our reasons for doing so. We hold that, under Section 21, only felonies can be disqualifying "infamous" crimes.
In May 2018, video surveillance captured Capriglione, Newport's then-police chief, backing his police vehicle into a pickup truck in the department's parking lot. Capriglione did not report the incident.2 A few days later, Capriglione ordered a "reset" of the town's video-surveillance system purportedly to address an ongoing malfunction.3 The reset deleted the previous two weeks of surveillance, including the footage of the parking-lot incident.4 In authorizing the reset, Capriglione rejected a second remedial option that would have corrected the malfunction and preserved all existing data.5
In June 2018, the State sought and obtained a grand jury indictment against Capriglione for four offenses: (1) failure to provide information at the scene of a collision, (2) careless driving, (3) tampering with physical evidence, a Class G felony, and (4) official misconduct, a Class A misdemeanor.6 The first two counts allege violations of the Delaware Motor Vehicle Code, while the latter two allege violations of the Delaware Criminal Code.
The parties reached an agreement under which Capriglione pleaded guilty to careless driving and official misconduct and the State agreed to enter a nolle prosequi on the remaining charges, including the felony tampering count.7 Capriglione also agreed to surrender his Council on Police Training certification and refrain from seeking further certification.8 In the written plea agreement, Capriglione acknowledged that he had "ordered the deletion of a surveillance video, which depicted him striking another vehicle in the parking lot of [the] Newport Police Department."9 Capriglione was sentenced to one year of probation and ordered to pay approximately $3,800 in restitution.10
Two years later, Capriglione decided to run for an open Commissioner position in Newport. Newport's Charter, consistently with 15 Del. C. § 7555(c)(1), prohibits felons from serving as a Commissioner.11 But Capriglione's official misconduct conviction was a misdemeanor, and he was elected on April 5, 2021, earning 32 votes, the most of the four Commissioners-elect.12
The Delaware Attorney General brought this action on behalf of the State on April 14, 2021, seeking a stay of Capriglione's swearing in—scheduled for the next day—and a writ of quo warranto13 to nullify his election.14 The Superior Court granted the stay and considered the parties’ filings as cross-motions for summary judgment.15
On May 4, the Superior Court, recognizing that the question before it was both difficult and consequential, held that Capriglione was constitutionally barred from holding public office.16 It observed that this Court had never squarely addressed the question of whether a misdemeanor can be an "infamous crime" under Section 21.17 The court also distinguished as dicta other Superior Court cases that indicated that only felonies can be disqualifying.18 It then conducted a totality-of-the-circumstances analysis and held that Capriglione's misdemeanor conviction was "infamous" because it involved dishonesty and "amount[ed] to a breach of the public trust" in light of Capriglione's position as police chief.19
We heard Capriglione's appeal on an expedited basis and reversed the Superior Court, allowing him to be sworn in.20 After considering the historical understanding of Section 21, the longstanding interpretation of the provision by this Court and the Superior Court, and the General Assembly's activity in this area, we hold that only felonies can be disqualifying "infamous" crimes under the Delaware Constitution.
This Court reviews the trial court's ruling on a motion for summary judgment de novo .21 We review questions of law and constitutional claims de novo .22
"Any analysis of a Delaware Constitutional provision begins with that provision's language itself."23 Our task is to ascertain both the intent of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1897 and the original public meaning of the language at issue.24 When the historical understanding of the provision is not dispositive, "we next turn to precedent[.]"25 In doing so, we consider the decisions of this Court and any well-developed decisional law of our State's lower courts.26
We begin, as the Superior Court did, with the text of Section 21. To the extent that the meaning of the text is not self-evident, we turn to the records of the Constitutional Convention of 1897 and other historical sources to determine how the framers intended the provision to operate and how the people of Delaware would have understood its language at the time of its adoption.27 This exercise leads us to conclude that the framers understood Section 21 "infamous crimes" to include only felonies and offenses punishable by multiple years in prison.
Section 21 provides:
No person who shall be convicted of embezzlement of the public money, bribery, perjury or other infamous crime, shall be eligible to a seat in either House of the General Assembly, or capable of holding any office of trust, honor or profit under this State.
Two textual features of Section 21 are noteworthy.
First, although the delegates provided elsewhere in the Constitution that "any high crime or misdemeanor" could support impeachment of a public official,28 the text of Section 21 does not go so far.
Second, Section 21 enumerates three specific disqualifying offenses—"embezzlement of the public money,29 bribery,30 [and] perjury31 "—each of which carried a multi-year jail sentence in 1897 or was a felony. The natural reading of "other infamous crime," then, is as a reference to serious offenses punishable by felony status or more than one year in prison.32
The convention debates support this inference. Although the discussion of Section 21 itself was brief,33 the delegates fixed their attention on the meaning of "infamous crime" when they debated Art. XV, § 6 ("Section 6"), which provides that "[t]he Governor shall remove from office any public officer convicted of misbehavior in office or of any infamous crime." As a textual matter, the separate enumeration of "misbehavior in office" and "infamous crime" indicates that the framers saw the offenses as distinct; otherwise, one or the other would be surplusage. Delegate William C. Spruance echoed this reading, explaining that "misbehavior in office may not necessarily be an infamous crime."34 As examples of what would constitute an "infamous" crime he listed larceny and robbery, two common-law felonies.35
Spruance also told his fellow delegates that "[t]here would be no difficulty in discovering what were infamous crimes[.]"36 Although this dispute may seem to refute that prediction, it is also the case that the 1880s and 1890s saw a growing national consensus about the meaning of "infamous crime." The United States Supreme Court drove this understanding with a series of decisions interpreting the Fifth Amendment to the federal Constitution, which guarantees that "[n]o person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime , unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury[.]"37 In 1885, the Court held in Ex parte Wilson38 that "a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term of years at hard labor is an infamous crime[,]" thus requiring an indictment for prosecution. It repeated this standard twice in the next decade.39 And while the convention debates on Sections 6 and 21 do not refer to the federal definition of "infamous crime," most of the delegates were trained in law,40 and the Wilson line of cases impacted all federal defendants, leading to national attention.41
In our view, the constitutional text and the historical evidence of its understanding strongly suggest that Section 21's "infamous crimes" bar did not encompass offenses that were not felonies or punishable by more than one year in prison. That said, we recognize that the evidence is not so conclusive as to establish a definitive—and case dispositive—historical understanding. We therefore address next the State's historical arguments, and then turn to the large body of Delaware case law that has interpreted Section 21.
The State urges us to adopt the interpretation of "infamous crimes" endorsed by the supreme courts of Pennsylvania and Arkansas. Both states...
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