Supreme Court gets it right, again

The Des Moines Register

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It's not often an Iowa Supreme Court decision quotes Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

But the court used the poet's famous turn of phrase to help explain why its ruling in a criminal sentencing case is right - even though it has what some see as an absurd result.

Like soldiers who do not question authority in Tennyson's “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (“theirs not to reason why / theirs but to do and die”), the court said, “Ours not to reason why, ours but to read and apply.”

The duty of the courts is to apply the law as written, even when the result strikes some as absurd. In this case, a convicted sex offender's prison sentence was reduced by the amount of time he was living at home on supervised probation, even though he violated the terms of probation by consorting with girls under the age of 17. Though “counterintuitive,” the unanimous court said that is precisely what the plain language of the law requires as written by the Iowa Legislature. It is for the Legislature, not the court, to change the law.

This ruling has created a stir because, if applied across the board, more than 2,100 offenders currently serving prison sentences could be eligible for early release. That includes some sex offenders considered potentially violent risks to the public.

It's worth keeping in mind, however, that all of these offenders will be eligible for release sooner or later, and this ruling would change that only by a matter of months in most cases.

The ruling is noteworthy because of what it says about the job of judges, which is timely in light of the controversy over the Iowa Supreme Court's 2009 decision in the same-sex marriage case.

Although the two cases are vastly different, the principle is the same: Judges do not “make law” when they interpret language of the Code of Iowa or the Iowa Constitution. That is true no matter how many times critics repeat the tiresome accusation that judges legislate from the bench.

The law in the criminal-sentencing case is clear: The statute, as amended by the Legislature in 1996, says offenders committed to prison “shall be given” credit for time served, including while under the supervision of the state on probation.

The Iowa attorney general's office, which argued that credit should be given only for jail-like confinement, said the court should have ruled in the state's favor by saying the statute is vague or that to rule otherwise would produce an absurd result. The court declined to do take either approach, and rightly so, because that would have required the very sort of result-oriented jurisprudence judges are often accused of practicing.

The court borrowed a quote from a 1962 decision to make the point: “If we do not follow the clear language of a statute, or of the Constitution, but by a fallacious theory of construction attempt to impose our own ideas of what is best, even if in so doing we conceive that we are promoting the public welfare and achieving a desirable result, we are indulging in judicial legislation and are invading the province of the legislative branch of the government, or of the electorate in amending the basic law.”

The court interpreted a criminal statute in this case. It interpreted the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution in the marriage case. Some may find the results of both decisions outrageous, but the principle is the same, and the court is entirely consistent in correctly applying it in both cases.

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