Connecticut abandons 'plain-meaning' rule for statutory interpretation.

Breaking with centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition, the Connecticut Supreme Court recently announced that it would no longer follow a rule of statutory construction that says courts should apply a literal reading of a statute's language unless it is ambiguous or would yield an unworkable result. (State v. Courchesne, 816 A.2d 562 (Conn. 2003).) The 5-2 decision marks only the second time a U.S. court has explicitly rejected the so-called plain-meaning rule.

The ruling arose from a capital murder case: Robert Courchesne had been charged with stabbing to death a pregnant woman, Demetris Rogers, and causing the death of her baby, who was delivered by cesarean section but died six weeks later. A three-judge panel round Courchesne guilty of the "murder of two or more persons at the same time or in the course of a single transaction." This offense made him eligible for the death penalty if prosecutors could show that the crime included one of several codified aggravating factors--specifically, that the "defendant committed the offense in an especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner."

Courchesne's attorney argued that the aggravating factor was inapplicable because only one of the murders, the mother's, met its definition. For the aggravating factor to apply, the defense claimed, the prosecution would need to show that both murders had been committed in an especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner. The trial court agreed, and the state appealed.

The high court acknowledged that a literal reading of the law supported the defendant's argument. "[The stature] requires that 'the offense' be committed in the aggravated manner; the likely referent of 'the offense' is the capital felony of which the defendant has been convicted; that capital felony at issue in the present case is the 'murder of two or more persons,' ...; and, therefore, the murder of two persons must be committed in the aggravated manner."

The court then veered off the linguistic-analysis trail. After viewing the statute in the context of similar laws and the legislative history that led to its passage, the court round that the legislature could not have meant to shield from execution a person who killed two people at the same time--one in an especially heinous way and the other one humanely--when that person otherwise would have been subject to the death penalty for the heinous murder alone.

"To attribute such an intent to the legislature, or, to put it another, more accurate way, to attribute such a meaning to the legislative language, would be to attribute to that language a perverse result," the Connecticut Supreme Court wrote.

The court then announced that it would no longer follow the dictates of the plain-meaning rule, which it said was fraught with flaws and inconsistencies, in determining the meaning of statutes.

"The rule is fundamentally inconsistent with the purposive and contextual nature of legislative language," the court said, and "inherently self-contradictory. It is a misnomer to say, as the plain-meaning rule says, that, if the language is plain and unambiguous, there is no room for interpretation, because application of the statutory language to the facts of the case is interpretation of that language."

The court also noted that application of the rule "necessarily requires the court to engage in a threshold determination of whether the language is ambiguous. This requirement, in turn, has led this court into a number of declarations that are, in our view, intellectually and linguistically dubious, and risk leaving the court open to the criticism of being result-oriented in interpreting statutes."

In the future, the court said, it would use a multistep interpretive process that would take into account the words of a statute itself, its legislative history and the circumstances surrounding its enactment, the legislative policy it was meant to implement, and its relationship to other statutes and common law principles governing the same subject.

While no other state has adopted the same formula for statutory interpretation, Alaska has declined to follow the plain-meaning rule for decades. And a Texas statute provides that courts in that state need not first determine that a statute is ambiguous before looking beyond its language to determine its meaning.

The two dissenting justices called the Courchesne decision "nothing short of breathtaking." The majority's new interpretation method is unique "for good reason," the dissenters wrote, branding it "radical," "misguided," and "likely to lead to an unpredictable and unconstrained statutory-interpretation jurisprudence."

Wesley Horton, a Hartford lawyer whose practice is primarily Connecticut and federal appellate cases, praised the decision, saying it was "what judges do subconsciously anyway when the clear language is obviously not what the legislature meant. Far better to state honestly what a court is doing than to stretch to make plain language seem ambiguous so that the court can go outside it."