People v. Iannone

• Decision Date: 30 November 1978
• Citation: 45 N.Y.2d 589,384 N.E.2d 656,412 N.Y.S.2d 110
• Parties: , 384 N.E.2d 656 The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Thomas IANNONE, Appellant. The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Joseph COROZZO, Also Known as Jo-Jo, Appellant.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

Page 110

412 N.Y.S.2d 110

45 N.Y.2d 589, 384 N.E.2d 656

The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Thomas IANNONE, Appellant.

The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Joseph COROZZO, Also Known as Jo-Jo, Appellant.

Court of Appeals of New York.

Nov. 30, 1978.

Rudolph E. Greco, Jr., Kew Gardens, for appellant in the first above-entitled action.

Patrick Henry, Dist. Atty. (Mark D. Cohen, Riverhead, of counsel), for respondent in the first above-entitled action.

Alexander Potruch, Lake Success, for appellant in the second above-entitled action.

Patrick Henry, Dist. Atty. (Mark D. Cohen, Riverhead, of counsel), for respondent in the second above-entitled action.

OPINION OF THE COURT

GABRIELLI, Judge.

Defendants in these two cases appeal from separate orders of the Appellate Division sustaining their respective convictions of criminal usury. In each case, the defendant contends that the indictment by which he was charged failed to state facts constituting a crime. For the reasons discussed below, the orders appealed from are affirmed.

Defendant Iannone was indicted by a Grand Jury for the crime of conspiracy and three counts of criminal usury. He pleaded guilty to one count of criminal usury in full satisfaction of that indictment. The count to which he pleaded guilty reads as follows: "AND THE GRAND JURY AFORESAID, by this Indictment, further accuse the above named defendants of the crime of CRIMINAL USURY, in violation of Section 190.40 of the Penal Law, committed as follows: The defendants, acting in concert and in aid of one another, from and between, in and about August of 1974 to December of 1974, in the County of Suffolk, not being authorized and permitted by law to do so, knowingly charged, took and received money as interest on a loan of a sum of money from a certain individual at a rate exceeding twenty-five percentum per annum and the equivalent rate for a shorter period." ¹ At sentencing, defendant for the first time moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground that it failed to set forth facts which constitute a crime. The motion was denied. On appeal to the Appellate Division, that court affirmed the judgment appealed from.

Defendant Corozzo was separately indicted for conspiracy, criminal usury, and grand larceny. The count charging him with criminal usury contained language very similar to that used in the Iannone indictment. ² Following a jury trial during which he unsuccessfully moved to dismiss the criminal usury count for failure to make out a prima facie case against him, Corozzo was convicted of that crime. The Appellate Division affirmed his conviction. Before this court, defendant for the first time seeks to argue that the indictment was insufficient for failure to allege facts stating a crime.

Were we to decide the question of the sufficiency of the challenged indictments on the merits, we would sustain them. The right to indictment by a Grand Jury before being tried for an infamous crime is explicitly guaranteed by section 6 of article I of our State Constitution. ³ That right is a fundamental one which ordinarily may not be waived by a defendant, since it not only accrues to the benefit of the individual defendant, but also serves to preserve a significant societal interest. ⁴ This does not mean, however, that any particular form of indictment is constitutionally mandated. A distinction must be drawn between the constitutional imperative that a person accused of an infamous crime normally be brought to trial only upon indictment by a Grand Jury, and the additional requirements as to the information a particular document issued by a Grand Jury must contain in order to serve as a valid and sufficient indictment.

The requirement of indictment by Grand Jury is intended to prevent the people of this State from potentially oppressive excesses by the agents of the government in the exercise of the prosecutorial authority vested in the State (see 1 Holdsworth, A History of English Law, p. 321 (3d ed., 1922)). Thus, before an individual may be publicly accused of crime and put to the onerous task of defending himself from such accusations, the State must convince a Grand Jury composed of the accused's peers that there exists sufficient evidence and legal reason to believe the accused guilty.

The indictment qua document, on the other hand, has traditionally served several purposes, not all of which implicate the right to indictment by Grand Jury, and not all of which remain as inextricably connected to the indictment as was once true. First and foremost, an indictment has been considered as the necessary method of providing the defendant with fair notice of the accusations made against him, so that he will be able to prepare a defense (see People v. Armlin, 6 N.Y.2d 231, 234, 189 N.Y.S.2d 179, 181, 160 N.E.2d 478, 480). This function of the indictment is founded not upon the right to indictment by a Grand Jury, but rather on the notice requirement of section 6 of article I of our State Constitution and presumably that of the Sixth Amendment to the Federal Constitution as well. Achievement of this purpose historically involved both a legal and a factual statement: normally the indictment has been required to both charge all the legally material elements of the crime of which defendant is accused, and state that defendant in fact committed the acts which comprise those elements (see People v. Farson, 244 N.Y. 413, 155 N.E. 724).

Another traditional function of the indictment qua document has been to provide some means of ensuring that the crime for which the defendant is brought to trial is in fact one for which he was indicted by the Grand Jury, rather than some alternative seized upon by the prosecution in light of subsequently discovered evidence (see Russell v. United States, 369 U.S. 749, 770, 82 S.Ct. 1038, 8 L.Ed.2d 240). This particular objective of an indictment obviously does rest upon the guarantee of indictment by a Grand Jury, as it is meant to protect against possible avoidance of that mandate in a particular case.

Finally, the indictment has traditionally been viewed as the proper means of indicating just what crime or crimes defendant has been tried for, in order to avoid subsequent attempts to retry him for the same crime or crimes (see People v. Williams, 243 N.Y. 162, 165, 153 N.E. 35, 36). This function is based upon the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy, of course, and is illustrative of the way in which the device of the indictment was seized upon as a convenient method of achieving several necessary goals.

Indeed, each of the functions traditionally fulfilled by the indictment is a necessary one, in the sense that each serves to provide some requisite constitutional protection. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the indictment is and must remain the constitutionally mandated means of securing each of those constitutional rights. To so hold would be to mistake the forms of legal procedure for the substantive guarantees they are intended to embody as best they can at a particular moment in legal history, and to encrust them with an aura of inflexible invulnerability which can only serve to deter subsequent attempts to create even more effective methods of achieving the ever elusive goal of justice. Rather, we must recognize that as a consequence of the vagaries of legal history and the not always consistent development of procedural mechanisms, each of these laudatory objectives was at one time deemed best achieved by utilization of the indictment. Such is not itself a constitutional imperative, however, and if a requisite constitutional protection is provided by other devices, the failure of a particular indictment to suffice for that particular purpose is not necessarily fatal.

The historical development of the form of indictment presently used in New York exemplifies a continuing attempt to eschew formalism and ritual in favor of a more realistic approach to the basic requirements of a valid indictment. Under the common law, the indictment was an arcane and intricate work of art which all too often served to mystify rather than to inform defendants. "At that time specialized knowledge of legal precedents and the technical craftsmanship of a legal artist were required for the drawing of an indictment. Perfection of form was essential to validity" (People v. Bogdanoff, 254 N.Y. 16, 21, 171 N.E. 890, 891; see 4 Blackstone's Commentaries, ch. 23). As one commentator reported, "very great niceties have been allowed to prevail * * * This circumstance has frequently been regretted by able judges, as offering too many opportunities for the escape of prisoners, to the encouragement rather than the depression of crime. Thus Lord Hale observed, that the strictness required in indictments was grown to be a blemish and inconvenience in the law" (1 Chitty's Criminal Law, p. 170). As significantly, the common-law indictment often "left the accused in the dark as to the nature of the crime charged" (Denzer, Practice Commentary, McKinney's Cons.Laws of N.Y., Book 11A, CPL art. 200, p. 195), thus actually failing to fulfill any of the traditional functions of an indictment even though it was technically sufficient.

With the enactment of the Code of Criminal Procedure (L.1881, ch. 442), the Legislature provided an alternative and considerably less complex form of indictment, which was intended to prevent dismissals of indictments due to mere technical defects while at the same time ensuring that the accused would be adequately informed of the charges lodged against him (see People v. Williams, 243 N.Y. 162, 153 N.E. 35, Supra ). Under section 275 of the code, an indictment was required to contain "(a) plain and concise statement of the facts constituting the crime". Although considerably simpler than the common-law indictment, the section 275 indictment became known to the bar as the "long-form" indictment following...