Philip Landry v. Judge J. Robert Hoepfner and William Guste, Jr., Attorney General, State of Louisiana

I respectfully dissent.

So far as I am able to discern, the majority opinion is the first by an appellate court to squarely hold that the Sixth Amendment requires a jury trial for the offense of driving while intoxicated (DWI) even though the maximum possible punishment does not exceed that for petty offenses and is substantially less than the legislature might have imposed.1 This holding, it seems to me, amounts to an invasion of the legislative prerogative to determine the seriousness of offenses not indictable at common law by the extent of the penalty provided, and unnecessarily imposes a…