Title: The People v. Jose Casiano Alonzo

State: new-york

Issuer: New York Appellate Court

Document:

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This opinion is uncorrected and subject to revision before
publication in the New York Reports.
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No. 26  
The People &c.,
            Appellant,
        v.
Jose Casiano Alonzo,
            Respondent.
Raffaelina Gianfrancesco, for appellant.
Joana Otaiza, for respondent.
SMITH, J.:
We hold that, where the evidence before a grand jury
shows a single, uninterrupted attack in which the attacker gropes
several parts of a victim's body, the attacker may be charged
with only one count of sexual abuse.
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No. 26
I
According to the evidence presented to a grand jury,
defendant persuaded two women to visit him in the middle of the
night at the apartment of a friend of his.  After a short stay,
the women decided they wanted to leave, but found that the door
was locked and defendant had concealed the key.  An argument on
this subject woke another person in the apartment, who persuaded
defendant to open the door.
Defendant followed the women out of the building,
grabbed one of them from behind and knocked her to the ground. 
He pinned her down with his body and groped her breasts and
buttocks, while the second woman tried to protect her friend by
hitting defendant, pulling his hair and screaming.  Defendant
responded by throwing the second woman down and getting on top of
her in turn, groping her breasts and buttocks also.  The first
victim then came to the aid of the second, hitting and biting
defendant and finally ending the encounter with a kick to the
stomach that gave the women a chance to run away.
The grand jury indicted defendant on two counts of
unlawful imprisonment and four of sexual abuse.  Only the sexual-
abuse counts concern us here.  There are two for each victim, the
first alleging forcible hand-to-breast contact, the second hand-
to-buttocks.  (The second count relating to the second victim
uses the word "breast" rather than "buttocks", but the grand-jury
transcript shows this to be an error.)  Defendant moved to
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No. 26
dismiss two of the four counts as multiplicitous.  County Court
granted his motion, and the Appellate Division affirmed (People v
Alonzo, 62 AD3d 720 [2009]).  A Judge of this Court granted the
People leave to appeal, and we now affirm.
II
Prosecutors and grand juries must steer between the
evils known as "duplicity" and "multiplicity."  An indictment is
duplicitous when a single count charges more than one offense
(e.g., People v Bauman, 12 NY3d 152 [2009]; People v Keindl, 68
NY2d 410 [1986]).  It is multiplicitous when a single offense is  
charged in more than one count (e.g., People v Senisi, 196 AD2d
376 [2d Dept 1994]).  A duplicitous indictment may fail to give a
defendant adequate notice and opportunity to defend; it may
impair his ability to assert the protection against double
jeopardy in a future case; and it may undermine the requirement
of jury unanimity, for if jurors are considering separate crimes
in a single count, some may find the defendant guilty of one, and
some of the other.  If an indictment is multiplicitous it creates
the risk that a defendant will be punished for, or stigmatized
with a conviction of, more crimes than he actually committed.
There is no infallible formula for deciding how many
crimes are committed in a particular sequence of events.  In each
case, the ultimate question is which result is more consistent
with the Legislature's intention.  As a general rule, however, it
may be said that where a defendant, in an uninterrupted course of
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No. 26
conduct directed at a single victim, violates a single provision
of the Penal Law, he commits but a single crime.  Thus, a
physical attack by one person upon another is normally but one
assault, though the attacker may hit the victim several times.  A
contrary rule would offer a temptation to abuse: Where there were
10 swings of a fist, a prosecutor might obtain 10 convictions
growing out of a single incident -- and could even seek 10
consecutive sentences, for Penal Law § 70.25 (2) does not require
concurrent sentencing for crimes committed through separate acts.
Penal Law § 130.65 (1) says that "[a] person is guilty
of sexual abuse in the first degree when he or she subjects
another person to sexual contact . . . [b]y forcible compulsion." 
"Sexual contact" is defined as "any touching of the sexual or
other intimate parts of a person . . . for the purpose of
gratifying sexual desire" (Penal Law § 130.00 [3]).  Here, to use
the words of the Appellate Division in People v Moffitt (20 AD3d
687, 690 [3d Dept 2005]) (quoted by County Court below), there
was "but a single, uninterrupted occurrence of forcible
compulsion."  It is true, as the People point out, that there
were at least two -- indeed probably more -- occurrences of
"sexual contact."  Unsurprisingly, neither victim claimed to
remember exactly how often defendant removed his hand and touched
her again in the course of groping her, or how often he moved a
hand from one body part to another, but it is clear that this
happened repeatedly.  To hold that each such movement of the hand
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No. 26
may be prosecuted as a separate crime would be contrary to common
sense.
Thus, the indictment as returned by the grand jury was
multiplicitous (accord, State v Woellhaf, 105 P3d 209 [Colo
2005]).  The People err in suggesting that it would have been
duplicitous to include the groping of each victim's breasts and
buttocks in a single count.  Neither of our leading cases on
duplicity, Keindl and Bauman, involves a single, uninterrupted
criminal act.  In Keindl, several counts of an indictment were
held duplicitous when they alleged separate acts of sodomy or
sexual abuse occurring on various occasions over a period of
weeks or months (68 NY2d at 419).  In Bauman, we held an assault
count duplicitous where it alleged 11 incidents over an eight
month period (12 NY3d at 155). 
The evidence in this case clearly shows a single crime
of sexual abuse against each victim.  Other cases may not be so
clear.  Where the evidence reasonably permits a grand jury to
find that either one or two crimes occurred, an indictment
charging two should not be dismissed: When the case is tried, the
court can reevaluate the evidence and decide how many crimes the
trial jury should consider.  Here, however, a single count as to
each victim is all the grand jury evidence will support.
Accordingly, the order of the Appellate Division should
be affirmed.   
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*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Order affirmed.  Opinion by Judge Smith.  Chief Judge Lippman and
Judges Ciparick, Graffeo, Read, Pigott and Jones concur.
Decided February 24, 2011
    
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