Shoul v. Commonwealth
| Decision Date | 22 November 2017 |
| Docket Number | No. 64 MAP 2015,64 MAP 2015 |
| Citation | 173 A.3d 669 |
| Parties | Lawrence S. SHOUL, Appellee v. COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION, BUREAU OF DRIVER LICENSING, Appellant |
| Court | Pennsylvania Supreme Court |
David R. Fine, Esq., for Participants.
Philip Murray Bricknell, Esq., Terrance M. Edwards, Esq., PA Department of Transportation, for Appellant.
Debra P. Fourlas, Esq., McNees, Wallace & Nurick, LLC, for Appellee.
Justice Wecht joins Parts I, II(B), and III of the opinion. Justices Baer and Dougherty join Parts I and II(B) of the opinion. Justice Mundy joins Parts I and II(A) of the opinion.
OPINION
In this appeal, we review the trial court's determination that 75 Pa.C.S. § 1611(e), providing that holders of commercial driver's licenses who are convicted of certain drug crimes while using motor vehicles are disqualified from holding such licenses for life, violates Pennsylvania's constitutional right to due process and the federal and Pennsylvania constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. After careful review, we reverse in part, vacate in part, and remand to the trial court for further proceedings.
By way of statutory background, 75 Pa.C.S. § 1611(e) derives from Title XII of the Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1986—titled the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act—as later amended by the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999.1 These federal enactments, inter alia, established a statutory disqualification scheme whereby holders of commercial driver's licenses ("CDLs") who engaged in certain crimes while using motor vehicles were disqualified from holding CDLs for specified periods of time, and also required states to adopt many of its provisions to continue receiving federal highway funding.2 In response, the General Assembly enacted the Uniform Commercial Driver's License Act,3 the purpose of which is "to implement the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act ... and reduce or prevent commercial motor vehicle accidents, fatalities and injuries by," inter alia, "[d]isqualifying commercial drivers who have committed certain serious traffic violations or other specified offenses." 75 Pa.C.S. § 1602. In particular, the General Assembly adopted 75 Pa.C.S. § 1611, which requires Appellee, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation ("PennDOT"), to manage Pennsylvania's parallel disqualification scheme. Section 1611 provides as follows, in pertinent part:
Id.§ 1611. It is the lifetime disqualification under subsection (e) that is the focus of this case.
Against this statutory backdrop, the factual and procedural history of this matter is relatively straightforward. In 2013, a Pennsylvania State Police informant asked Appellee Lawrence S. Shoul, who held a CDL, to retrieve marijuana from one of Appellee's co-workers and deliver it to the informant. Appellee obliged, using a motor vehicle to do so, whereupon he was arrested and charged with two counts of felony manufacture, delivery, or possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance, 35 P.S. § 780–113(a)(30), and ultimately convicted of the same.4 Thereafter, PennDOT notified Appellee that, pursuant to Section 1611(e), he was disqualified from holding a CDL for life. Appellee appealed his disqualification to the trial court, asserting, as pertinent herein, that Section 1611(e) : (1) violated his federal and Pennsylvania constitutional rights to substantive due process because it was not rationally related to promoting highway safety; and (2) violated the federal and Pennsylvania constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment because, although it was formally a civil sanction, it was functionally a criminal punishment and was so irrational and disproportionate to his conduct as to be cruel and unusual. In response, PennDOT argued that Section 1611(e) was rationally related to promoting highway safety, as well as deterring drug trafficking and complying with certain federal highway funding requirements; and that it is both formally and functionally a civil sanction.
The trial court found that Section 1611(e) violated Pennsylvania's constitutional right to substantive due process and the federal and Pennsylvania constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. Specifically, concerning Appellee's claim that Section 1611(e) violated his right to substantive due process, the court did not address the federal constitutional issue, but agreed with Appellee that, as a Pennsylvania constitutional matter, statutes affecting one's right to hold a CDL must bear a rational relationship to a legitimate governmental objective, and that Section 1611(e) is not rationally related to promoting highway safety, reasoning that Appellee's conduct posed no danger thereto:
[T]here is no suggestion that during the underlying incident [Appellee] was ... under the influence of ... marijuana or that he posed any safety hazard at all. No rational argument can be made that a CDL holder unlawfully delivering a controlled substance is likely to create a commercial vehicle highway safety hazard. It is more likely that a CDL holder unlawfully delivering marijuana will drive safely so as not to call law enforcement attention to himself.
Trial Ct. Op., 2/24/15, at 10–11 (footnote omitted). The court also opined that Section 1611(e) was not rationally related to highway safety because it was uniquely harsh when compared to some of Section 1611's other disqualification provisions involving conduct it viewed as more dangerous to highway safety:
[A] CDL holder who is operating a commercial vehicle while under the influence of marijuana is only subject to a one year disqualification. Similarly, a CDL holder who causes the death of another as a result of criminally negligent operation of a motor vehicle is likewise disqualified for one year. Only where a CDL holder has two or more of these convictions is he subject to a lifetime disqualification, and then he may seek reduction of that sanction to 10 years. Furthermore, a CDL holder convicted of two serious traffic violations only receives a 60–day disqualification. What appears clear is that the lifetime disqualification at issue is only tangentially related to highway safety if other factors are present, which do not appear in this case.
Id. at 11 (quotation marks and citations omitted). Finally, relying on then-Justice, later-Chief Justice Castille's rationale in his concurring opinion in Nixon v. Commonwealth, 576 Pa. 385,839 A.2d 277 (2003),5 the court opined that Section 1611(e) was not rationally related to the promotion of highway safety because it failed to account for offenders' potential for rehabilitation:
To paraphrase Justice Castille in Nixon, there may be offenses which are so severe that any reasonable person would agree that a lifetime ban from having a CDL is rational and required. But it is difficult to find a rational basis for automatically concluding that unlawfully delivering marijuana creates such a safety issue that an individual, otherwise qualified to safely operate a commercial...
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