DISTRICT COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF FLORIDA

FOURTH DISTRICT

CEDRIC DENNARD,

Appellant,

v.

STATE OF FLORIDA,

Appellee.

No. 4D13-3610

[January 21, 2015]

Appeal of order denying rule 3.800 motion from the Circuit Court for 

the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, Palm Beach County; Karen Miller, Judge; 

L.T. Case No. 2000CF3809AXXXMB.

Cedric Dennard, Clermont, pro se.

Pamela Jo Bondi, Attorney General, Tallahassee, and Allen R. Geesey, 

Assistant Attorney General, West Palm Beach, for appellee.

ON MOTION FOR CERTIFICATION

PER CURIAM.

We deny appellant’s motion for certification.

LEVINE and CONNER, JJ., concur.

WARNER, J., dissents with opinion.

WARNER, J., dissenting with opinion.

The appellant has moved to certify questions to the supreme court as 

questions of great public importance. I think the majority wrongly applies 

the “no manifest injustice” exception in State v. McBride, 848 So. 2d 287, 

291-92 (Fla. 2003), to this case, where all the sentences are illegal. It also 

conflicts with Cooper v. State, 960 So. 2d 849, 851 (Fla. 1st DCA 2007) 

(holding the fact that a court could have imposed consecutive sentences to 

impose the same overall sentence does not cure an illegal sentence, which 

requires resentencing). Therefore I would certify the following question:
2

WHERE THE DEFENDANT IS SERVING NO LEGAL 

SENTENCE, CAN A COURT DENY CORRECTION OF AN 

ILLEGAL SENTENCE ON THE GROUNDS THAT NO 

MANIFEST INJUSTICE OCCURS, BECAUSE THE COURT ON 

RESENTENCING COULD STRUCTURE A LEGAL SENTENCE 

OF THE SAME LENGTH?

Despite the refusal to certify a question, I would argue that the majority 

opinion actually conflicts with McBride. In McBride, the court reviewed the 

sentence to determine whether a manifest injustice has occurred “that can 

be determined from the face of the record.” 848 So. 2d at 292 (emphasis 

supplied). In McBride, there was no manifest injustice because the 

defendant was serving another legal sentence, a fact that appeared on the 

face of the record. Here, the record only shows that the appellant is serving 

illegal sentences. Therefore, on the record, there is a manifest injustice.

The reason why the courts must correct illegal sentences at any time is 

best put by Justice Pariente in her concurrence in McBride:

As we noted in Maddox [v. State, 760 So. 2d 89 (Fla. 2000)], 

“[t]he extraordinary provision made for remedying illegal 

sentences evidences the utmost importance of correcting such 

errors, even at the expense of legal principles that might 

preclude relief from trial court errors of less consequence.” 

760 So. 2d at 101. We recognized that “clearly the class of 

errors that constitute an ‘illegal’ sentence that can be raised 

for the first time in a postconviction motion decades after a 

sentence becomes final is a narrower class of errors than 

those termed ‘fundamental’ errors that can be raised on direct 

appeal even though unpreserved.” Id. at 100 n. 8. We 

observed in Maddox that the State recognizes that it “has no 

interest in any defendant serving a sentence that is longer 

than the sentence authorized by law.” Id. at 99. Indeed, the 

entire justice system certainly has an interest in ensuring that 

the defendant is not incarcerated longer than is authorized by 

law, or under illegal terms. The courts have an obligation to 

correct any such error whenever it is brought to their attention.

Id. at 293-94 (emphasis supplied). Appellant’s sentences should have 

been corrected, and we should certify this issue to the supreme court.

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