Supreme Court Summaries

Opinions filed April 17, 2008

Nos.    103616            People v. Carpenter

103856 People v. Garibaldi

            103857 cons.  People v. Montes-Medina

Citations:

Carpenter: 368 Ill. App. 3d 288.

Garibaldi & Montes-Medina: direct appeals from the circuit court of Grundy County.

      JUSTICE KARMEIER delivered the judgment of the court, with opinion.

      Chief Justice Thomas and Justices Fitzgerald and Garman concurred in the judgment and opinion.

      Justice Kilbride specially concurred, with opinion, joined by Justices Freeman and Burke.

      Justice Burke specially concurred, with opinion, joined by Justices Freeman and Kilbride.

      These three consolidated cases arise from vehicle air bag compartments which contained something other than air bags. In the Cook County case of Derrick Carpenter, a BB gun was in an unused air bag space, and its handle was visible to Chicago police who stopped the driver for questioning in 2004. In Grundy County, Sergio Garibaldi and Ignacio Montes-Medina were indicted in connection with a 2006 incident in which a large amount of currency was found in the closed air bag space of a vehicle that Garibaldi allegedly operated and Montes-Medina allegedly owned.

      Carpenter was found guilty in a bench trial of the felony offense of having a false or secret compartment in the motor vehicle and sentenced to a two-term of imprisonment. On appeal, however, the appellate court held the statute in question unconstitutional as violative of substantive due process guarantees because it sweeps so broadly as to potentially encompass innocent conduct. When indictments against the other two defendants were later brought in Grundy County, the circuit court, relying on the earlier appellate court ruling, dismissed the charges.

      In this decision, the Illinois Supreme Court agreed with the results reached below in all three cases and affirmed. It held the statute facially invalid on due process grounds for failing to survive the rational basis test that a statute must employ reasonable means to reach a desired objective. The court noted that the statute does not even require the contents of the compartment in question to be illegal for a conviction to result, and that, in these cases, nothing illegal was found in the compartments.