State v. Terrebonne

• Decision Date: 10 February 1978
• Docket Number: No. 60731,60731
• Parties: STATE of Louisiana v. Ricky J. TERREBONNE.
• Court: Louisiana Supreme Court

Page 1356

354 So.2d 1356

STATE of Louisiana v. Ricky J. TERREBONNE.

No. 60731.

Supreme Court of Louisiana.

Feb. 10, 1978.

A. J. Boudreaux, Staff Appeals Atty., Indigent Defender Bd., 24th Judicial Dist. Court, New Orleans, for defendant-appellant.

William J. Guste, Jr., Atty. Gen., Barbara Rutledge, Asst. Atty. Gen., John M. Mamoulides, Dist. Atty., Abbott J. Reeves, Director, Research and Appeals Div., Metairie, Roy F. Blondeau, Jr., Asst. Dist. Atty., for plaintiff-appellee.

PER CURIAM.

Affirmed.

TATE, J., concurs and assigns reasons.

CALOGERO, J., concurs, joining in TATE, J., reasons.

DENNIS, J., joins in the concurring opinion of TATE, J., and assigns additional concurring reasons.

TATE, Justice, concurring.

On the basis of present jurisprudence, I reluctantly concur in this affirmance of a mandatory life sentence for the offense of distribution of heroin.

The accused is a heroin addict. The governmental agents persuaded him to secure delivery of 22 papers of heroin to his home, with an agent paying the $175.00 price for the supplier. The accused addict was given 2 or 3 papers for his help in arranging the transaction.

The crime was thus instigated and financed by governmental agents, with full knowledge that the addict assisted them to arrange their transaction simply to satisfy his own compelling addiction. I venture to say that the life sentence received by this addict, under these circumstances, will by some future generation be regarded in the same light as we do the tales of people burned to death upon conviction of witchery.

Technically, of course, this addict is as guilty of "distribution" as the rich and evil professional mass-supplier for whom presumably the legislature devised the life sentence for the crime, which (if constitutional) the courts must mandatorily impose. The present is just one of the score or so of life sentences we have in the present month affirmed for the distribution offense. Many, if not most, of them involve addicts like the present, induced through undercover governmental agents and their own need or their sympathy for a (presumed) fellow addict into committing the offense.

The extreme circumstances of the present case indicate to me that we should give serious consideration to re-examining our holdings that the mandatory life sentence for this drug does not offend constitutional guarantees, La.Const. Art. 1, Section 20, against cruel, excessive, or unusual punishment. See State v. Whitehurst, 319 So.2d 907 (La.1975) and subsequent decisions.

Further, the rationale of these decisions rests in part upon the former judicial discretion to afford probation or suspension of sentence, which would permit some individualization of punishment to accord with the individual offense and offender. This basis for constitutionality has been eroded by the legislative elimination of any such judicial discretion through the amendment of La.R.S. 40:966(B) by Act 631 of 1977. This enactment (providing for no judicial discretion in the imposition of mandatory life confinement for this offense) was enacted subsequent to the present offense, but it underlines the basic irrationality of a legislatively-mandated life sentence for a non-violent drug offense, regardless of the circumstances of the crime or of the offender, or of the degree of the guilt as a retailer or wholesaler or mere giver of drugs, however large or small the quantity.

As stated by the United States Supreme Court in Coker v. Georgia, --- U.S. ----, 97 S.Ct. 2861, 2865, 53 L.Ed.2d 982 (1977), "a punishment is 'excessive' and unconstitutional if it (either) (1) makes no measurable contribution to acceptable goals of punishment and hence is nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering; or (2) is grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime."

A ...