Billman v. Municipality of Anchorage

954 P.2d 1380, 1998 Alas. App. LEXIS 13, 1998 WL 106992
CourtCourt of Appeals of Alaska
DecidedMarch 13, 1998
DocketA-6578, A-6682
StatusPublished

This text of 954 P.2d 1380 (Billman v. Municipality of Anchorage) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Alaska primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Billman v. Municipality of Anchorage, 954 P.2d 1380, 1998 Alas. App. LEXIS 13, 1998 WL 106992 (Ala. Ct. App. 1998).

Opinion

OPINION

MANNHEIMER, Judge.

The two defendants, Timothy Billman and Tae K. Kang, were convicted of driving while intoxicated, Anchorage Municipal Code 9.28.020(A). On appeal, they assert that they were not brought to trial within the time limits of Alaska’s speedy trial rule, Criminal Rule 45, and thus the charges against them should be dismissed. The crucial issue in this appeal is the meaning of an order that this court issued on January 12,1996, dealing with the hundreds of cases (including Bill-man’s and Kang’s) that were held in abeyance pending our decision of State v. Zerkel, File No. A-5773. In particular, the issue is whether our January 12th order returned jurisdiction over the defendants’ cases to the district court. We agree with Billman and Kang that this order returned jurisdiction of their cases to the district court, thus restarting the defendants’ speedy trial calculation under Criminal Rule 45. However, we also conclude that the defendants’ scheduled trial date of July 17, 1996 was within the time limits of Rule 45. We therefore affirm the defendants’ convictions.

Billman and Kang were each arrested for driving while intoxicated; they submitted to breath tests which showed their blood-alcohol levels to be .10 percent or higher. Based on these breath-test results, the Department of Public Safety took administrative action against both defendants’ driver’s licenses.

At the same time, the Municipality of Anchorage was pursuing criminal charges against Billman and Kang for driving while intoxicated. The two defendants asked the district court to dismiss the DWI charges on double jeopardy grounds; they asserted that the suspension of their driver’s licenses constituted a punishment for their acts of driving while intoxicated, and therefore the double jeopardy clause prohibited the gov *1382 ernment from trying to punish them again by pursuing the criminal prosecutions.

The district court agreed with the two defendants and ordered the DWI charges dismissed. The Municipality of Anchorage appealed the dismissals to this court. Because we were already considering the same double jeopardy issue in a group of consolidated cases now known as State v. Zerkel, we held the Municipality’s appeals in abeyance pending our decision of Zerkel.

Ultimately, in State v. Zerkel, 900 P.2d 744 (Alaska App.1995), this court held that the administrative suspension or revocation of a driver’s license does not constitute a “punishment” for double jeopardy purposes — and thus the government can prosecute a defendant for driving while intoxicated (or breath-test refusal) even after the government has taken administrative action against the defendant’s driver’s license. However, the Municipality’s appeals in Billman’s and Kang’s cases were still held in abeyance pending the Alaska Supreme Court’s action on a petition for hearing (that is, a petition for discretionary review) in Zerkel.

On December 4,1995, the Alaska Supreme Court denied hearing in Zerkel. Five weeks later, on January 12, 1996, this court issued an order dealing with all of the DWI and breath-test refusal cases that had been held in abeyance pending a final decision in Zerk-el. In Paragraph 2(a) of that order, we addressed “all cases [like Billman’s and Kang’s] where criminal charges were dismissed based on a trial court ruling that administrative suspension or revocation of the defendant’s driver’s license barred a later prosecution for a related driving offense”:

[T]hese cases shall be REMANDED to the trial courts for further consideration in light of this court’s decision in Zerkel. Any previously filed motion for stay that has not already been granted shall be deemed to have been granted nunc pro tunc.

As we recently held in Garcia v. State, 947 P.2d 1363 (Alaska App.1997), the Rule 45 calculation for all of these Zerkel-related cases was restarted at Day 1 when we remanded these cases to the district court. Our January 12th order was apparently distributed the following Monday — that is, on January 15, 1996 — so Day 1 for Rule 45 purposes was January 16th. See Nickels v. State, 545 P.2d 163, 165 (Alaska 1976) (when an event triggers Rule 45, the following day is deemed Day 1).

No action was taken in Billman's and Kang’s cases until April 23rd. On that day, the Municipality filed formal motions asking the district court to reconsider its earlier dismissals of the two defendants’ cases in light of Zerkel, and to set the defendants’ cases for trial. Three weeks later, on May 15th, Billman and Kang filed oppositions to the Municipality’s motions; the two defendants argued that the time for bringing them to trial under Rule 45 had already expired. On June 26th, the district court granted the Municipality’s motions, set aside its earlier dismissals of Billman’s and Kang’s prosecutions, and calendared the defendants’ trials for July 17,1996.

The oppositions filed by Billman and Kang on May 15th were, in effect, motions asking the district court to dismiss their cases on Rule 45 grounds. The filing of these motions tolled the running of Rule 45. See Criminal Rule 45(d)(1); State v. Angaiak, 847 P.2d 1068, 1072 n. 5 (Alaska App.1993). The question, then, is whether Rule 45 had already expired on May 15th.

The district court denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss because the court concluded that, in our January 12th order, we did not return jurisdiction over the defendants’ cases to the district court. The district court interpreted our order to mean that, for all of the Zerkel-related eases covered by Paragraph 2(a), we asked the district court to reconsider any previously-entered dismissals in light of Zerkel but, at the same time, we retained jurisdiction over all of these cases pending the outcome of the district court’s reconsiderations. The district court reached this conclusion based on the fact that Paragraph 2(a) contained the sentence: “Any previously filed motion for stay that has not already been granted shall be deemed to have been granted nunc pro tunc.”

The district court’s interpretation of our January 12th order is mistaken. We did not *1383 retain jurisdiction over the cases covered by Paragraph 2(a) of our order. These eases were explicitly “remanded to the trial courts for further consideration in light of ... Zerk-el ”. The sentence of Paragraph 2(a) dealing with “motion[s] for stay[s]” was not intended to signify our desire to retain control of these cases. Rather, we included this sentence to ensure that, among the hundreds of prosecutions held in abeyance pending our decision in Zerkel,

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

Related

State v. Zerkel
900 P.2d 744 (Court of Appeals of Alaska, 1995)
Cooksey v. State
524 P.2d 1251 (Alaska Supreme Court, 1974)
Nickels v. State
545 P.2d 163 (Alaska Supreme Court, 1976)
Garcia v. State
947 P.2d 1363 (Court of Appeals of Alaska, 1997)
State v. Angaiak
847 P.2d 1068 (Court of Appeals of Alaska, 1993)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
954 P.2d 1380, 1998 Alas. App. LEXIS 13, 1998 WL 106992, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/billman-v-municipality-of-anchorage-alaskactapp-1998.