PCAs in the DCAs.

• Author: Been, Steven A.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

Justice England's comments on the "PCA" problem in the March Bar Journal are helpful and his suggestions are good, but in my opinion his recommendations do not go far enough. What is needed is more than guidelines, even guidelines written into the rule. The district court judges already know that appellate practitioners view PCAs on serious issues to be inappropriate. The judges simply do not agree. At a Tallahassee seminar ON Professionalism in Appellate Practice led by three First District judges on May 23, 2002, the judges stated, without apology, that the First District sometimes issues PCAs because the judges on a panel cannot agree on a rationale for their decision. A Third District judge, speaking at a public defenders' conference a few years ago, referring to PCAs, said, "We can run and we can hide."

The problem is that no rule prohibits district courts from issuing PCAs for any reason they choose. They can issue PCAs to deal with their excessive workload, to avoid airing disagreements about the law among the judges, or even to evade Supreme Court review, without violating any rule.

What is needed is a rule that states explicitly under what circumstances the court must write an opinion, and under what circumstances the court need not write an opinion. Such a rule should focus on issues, not cases.

All criminal appellate lawyers know of decisions that technically would not be called PCAs, in which hotly contested, hard to decide issues involving the sufficiency of the evidence and the fairness of the trial were affirmed without explanation, but the court wrote on a minor sentencing issue. Of course, no rule, other than a rule requiring an explanation for the disposition of every issue in the briefs, is going to totally eliminate the inappropriate use of PCAs. Actually, a rule requiring explanations without exception might be the best solution. But even without that, if the appellate rules specified the situations in which courts would be required to explain their decisions, I suspect that would go a long way toward improving the quality of appellate justice, and eliminating the controversy over PCAs.

STEVEN A. BEEN

Tallahassee

How easy it is for Mr. England to lump together all matters that appear in the various district courts for review in support of his views on PCAs, without the mention of one major area of law that does not get the benefit of appellate review except in one district court of appeal. I write of workers'...