Clark v. Commissioner of Correction

• Decision Date: 22 March 2005
• Docket Number: (AC 24683).
• Court: Connecticut Court of Appeals
• Parties: KENNETH CLARK v. COMMISSIONER OF CORRECTION

88 Conn. App. 178

868 A.2d 798

KENNETH CLARK v. COMMISSIONER OF CORRECTION

(AC 24683).

Appellate Court of Connecticut.

Argued November 16, 2004.

Officially released March 22, 2005.

Lavery, C. J., and DiPentima and Peters, Js.

Kent Drager, senior assistant public defender, for the appellant (petitioner).

Robert J. Scheinblum, assistant state's attorney, with whom, on the brief, was Michael Dearington, state's attorney, for the appellee (respondent).

Opinion

PETERS, J.

In this petition for a writ of habeas corpus, the petitioner seeks relief from a writ of extradition sending him to Texas to face criminal charges in that state. Under the Uniform Criminal Extradition Act (act), General Statutes § 54-157 et seq., he is subject to mandatory extradition only if he is a fugitive from justice in Texas. The petitioner claims that he is not a fugitive from justice in Texas because he was taken involuntarily from Texas to this state in order to stand trial on criminal charges here. In the absence of any disputed questions of fact, the issue he raises calls for statutory construction of the act. The trial court concluded that the act authorized his extradition and dismissed the petitioner's application for the writ. The petitioner has appealed. We reverse the judgment of the trial court.

The petitioner, Kenneth Clark, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in which he claimed that, because he is not a fugitive from justice, the respondent, the commissioner of correction,¹ is illegally retaining the petitioner in his custody. On April 3, 2003, the petitioner was arrested in Connecticut without a warrant, pursuant to General Statutes § 54-170,² as a fugitive from justice on an outstanding felony charge from the state of Texas.³ After the petitioner refused to waive his right to challenge extradition, the trial court, B. Kaplan, J., ordered the petitioner confined to enable the state to obtain a governor's extradition warrant.⁴

The facts of this case are uncontested. In 1996, the petitioner had been extradited involuntarily from Texas to this state because of an outstanding parole violation. After having been returned to this state, the petitioner was incarcerated here until April, 2000.

In pursuit of his request for extradition in the present case, the governor of Texas sent to our governor a written demand, dated April 17, 2003, for the extradition of the petitioner. See General Statutes § 54-157 et seq. In accordance with General Statutes § 54-159,⁵ the extradition demand stated that the petitioner had been charged with the commission of a crime in the state of Texas, "was present in [Texas] at the time of the commission of said crime," "thereafter fled from the justice of [Texas]," and had taken refuge in Connecticut. The extradition demand consistently referred to the petitioner as a "fugitive."⁶ In response, on April 29, 2003, our governor exercised his power, pursuant to General Statutes § 54-163,⁷ to issue a warrant for the arrest of the petitioner.⁸ The petitioner was arrested on May 2, 2003.

The petitioner's petition for a writ of habeas corpus to challenge his status as a fugitive was heard by the habeas court, Hon. William L. Hadden, Jr., judge trial referee. Judge Hadden found that "the extradition papers [were] in order in satisfaction of General Statutes § 54-159, that the petitioner has been identified as the individual the state of Texas seeks to extradite, there is probable cause to believe he committed a crime in that state, and he is a fugitive from justice." Accordingly, Judge Hadden dismissed the habeas petition and ordered the petitioner extradited to Texas. The petitioner now appeals.

As a preliminary matter, we note that the parties stand on common ground with regard to three important issues. First, the parties agree that the petitioner left Texas involuntarily when he was extradited to Connecticut in 1996. Second, they agree that Connecticut's version of the act draws a distinction between the extradition of a fugitive and the extradition of a nonfugitive. A demand for a fugitive imposes on the governor a mandatory duty of compliance,⁹ whereas a demand for a nonfugitive authorizes the governor to exercise discretion to decide whether to order extradition.¹⁰ Third, the parties agree that our resolution of the disputed issue of whether the petitioner is a fugitive from justice is dispositive for the outcome of this case. If we conclude that the petitioner was not a fugitive from justice, the respondent agrees with the petitioner that the present extradition demand was invalid.

The underlying issue in this appeal, therefore, concerns the relative scope of the mandatory and discretionary provisions of the act, as enacted in Connecticut. Because this is a question of statutory interpretation, our review is plenary. See, e.g., Harris v. Commissioner of Correction, 271 Conn. 808, 818, 860 A.2d 715 (2004). General Statutes § 1-2z provides that "[t]he meaning of a statute shall, in the first instance, be ascertained from the text of the statute itself and its relationship to other statutes. If, after examining such text and considering such relationship, the meaning of such text is plain and unambiguous and does not yield absurd or unworkable results, extratextual evidence of the meaning of the statute shall not be considered." If, on the other hand, the meaning of the statute is not plain and unambiguous, then "we [also] look to the words of the statute itself, to the legislative history and circumstances surrounding its enactment, to the legislative policy it was designed to implement, and to its relationship to existing legislation and common law principles governing the same general subject matter for [interpretive guidance]." (Internal quotation marks omitted.) State v. Boyd, 272 Conn. 72, 76, 861 A.2d 1155 (2004).

The petitioner argues that § 5 of the act,¹¹ enacted in this state as General Statutes § 54-161,¹² plainly establishes the principle that a person is not a fugitive if he was removed involuntarily from the demanding state by government compulsion. From this premise, he contends that, because he was not a fugitive under § 54-161, the extradition demand from the state of Texas was invalid because it sought to extradite him as such. This misconception caused the Texas demand to mislead our governor into believing that he had no discretion in deciding whether to extradite the petitioner.

The respondent does not challenge the petitioner's reading of § 54-161. It argues, instead, that General Statutes § 54-158 is the applicable statute because it reflects the holdings of Connecticut common-law cases decided before the enactment of the act. It is undisputed that this case law held that a person could be deemed a fugitive even if he had been removed involuntarily from the demanding state by government compulsion. Moulthrope v. Matus, 139 Conn. 272, 277-78, 93 A.2d 149 (1952), cert. denied, 345 U.S. 926, 73 S. Ct. 785, 97 L. Ed. 1357 (1953). The question is whether Moulthrope has been overruled by the enactment of § 54-161.

I

The uniform act was promulgated to supplement federal extradition law. Federal extradition law, which derives its authority from the United States constitution¹³ and from federal statute,¹⁴ neither requires nor prohibits the extradition of nonfugitives. Hill v. Blake, 186 Conn. 404, 408, 441 A.2d 841 (1982). By contrast, under federal law, extradition of fugitives is mandatory. Once the required formalities have been satisfied, a governor must comply with an extradition demand. New Mexico ex rel. Ortiz v. Reed, 524 U.S. 151, 154-55, 118 S. Ct. 1860, 141 L. Ed. 2d 131 (1998).

The uniform act not only implements the extradition requirements of federal law¹⁵ but also includes provisions "designed to cover cases not clearly reached by existing [federal] extradition laws." Commissioners' Prefatory Note, Uniform Criminal Extradition Act, 11 U.L.A. 292 (Master Ed. 2003). The commissioners were aware of the fact that, prior to the adoption of the act, state courts were divided about the status of a person resisting extradition because he had left the demanding state under the legal compulsion of the state in which he was then residing. Id., § 5, Commissioners' Note, p. 464. To resolve this conflict, the commissioners drafted § 5, which permits the extradition of certain criminals not recognized as fugitives by some state courts.¹⁶ Id. Under § 5, the extradition of those who are not fugitives is left to the discretion of the governor of the state in which the putative criminal is found. Id., pp. 463-64.

When our legislature enacted § 5 of the act as General Statutes § 54-161, it modified the title of that section by deleting any reference to a person's leaving a demanding state under compulsion.¹⁷ Without changing the text of § 5, the legislature also deleted all of the commissioners' commentary about the purpose of § 5.¹⁸ General Statutes § 54-161 unconditionally provides, however, that our governor "may . . . surrender . . . any person in this state who is charged . . . with having violated the laws of [another] state . . . even though such person left the demanding state involuntarily." (Emphasis added.)

II

The plain language of § 54-161 supports the petitioner's argument that our extradition law does not make it mandatory to extradite a nonfugitive. No Connecticut court has directly considered whether to attribute a different meaning to the statute.

The respondent argues, however, that our case law indirectly has declined to make the distinction between fugitives and nonfugitives that § 54-161 seems to embody. He relies on two cases, Barrila v. Blake, 190 Conn. 631, 461 A.2d 1375 (1983), and Hill v. Blake, supra, 186 Conn. 409, both of which were decided subsequent to the enactment of the act. We are not persuaded.

Barrila was a case in which the plaintiff challenged the legality of an extradition demand by asserting that he had not been present in...