Source: http://ca.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.20110330_0002375.CA.htm/qx
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 20:03:57+00:00

Document:
SOMNANG KIM, DEFENDANT AND APPELLANT.
In what might serve as a monument to our "Byzantine" sentencing law (People v. Velasquez (1999) 69 Cal.App.4th 503, 505), we are called upon to decide how many lifetimes a defendant can be sentenced to spend in prison based upon a plea agreement calling for him to spend only one. We hold that where a criminal defendant enters a guilty plea on the understanding that he will serve one lifetime in prison, he cannot be sentenced to serve two or more lifetimes without first being given an opportunity to withdraw his plea. Because defendant Somnang Kim was sentenced to several lifetimes without being offered that choice, we will reverse the judgment and remand with directions.
In late 2003, defendant and two fellow gang members, Savin Sam and Bunnrith Pech, engaged in several shooting rampages in which each of them carried and discharged a firearm. In total they shot at 15 people, killing three of them. A few months earlier defendant had shot at two other people. All three men were charged by indictment with three counts of murder and, in defendant's case, 13 counts of attempted murder, plus three counts of assault with a firearm.*fn1 The indictment exposed all three to the death penalty by charging two special circumstances: that they committed the murders as active participants in a criminal street gang (Pen. Code, § 190.2, subd. (a)(22)), and that each was guilty of multiple murders (Pen. Code, § 190.2, subd. (a)(3)). Numerous non-capital sentence enhancements were charged, including that each defendant personally inflicted serious injury with a firearm (Pen. Code, § 12022.53 (§ 12022.53), subd. (d)).
All three defendants agreed to plead guilty on the understanding that the prosecution would abandon its efforts to secure a death sentence and that they would be sentenced instead to life without possibility of parole. At sentencing, however, the prosecutor urged the court to adopt the probation officer's recommendation, which was, in defendant's case, a life-without-parole term consecutive to three additional terms: life with possibility of parole, 400 years to life, and 29 years 8 months. Defendant's attorney objected that such a sentence would violate the plea bargain as well as the admonitions the court gave to defendant when he entered his plea, and that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The court nonetheless imposed the recommended sentence. At no time did it indicate whether it was acting in conformity with the terms of the bargain as it understood them, or intended instead to deviate from those terms. In any event it did not offer defendant an opportunity to withdraw his plea. Sam did not appeal. Pech filed a notice of appeal and opening brief, but then dismissed his appeal. Only Kim's appeal is now before us.
Defendant contends that the sentence here violated the plea agreement, and respondent concedes the point, stating that it "significantly deviated from the agreed-upon sentence" and marked "a substantial deviation from the agreed-upon plea." We cannot help but detect in this premise a tinge of the absurdity inherent in multiple consecutive life sentences. For a sentence to violate a plea bargain, it must impose a "punishment more severe" than whatever the defendant agreed to. (People v. Brown (2007) 147 Cal.App.4th 1213, 1221.) In what sense is imprisonment for multiple lifetimes--in this case at least five--"more severe" than imprisonment for one lifetime?*fn2 By granting the defendant only one life, nature provides an absolute invulnerability to such supernumerary sentences. To sentence him to multiple lifetimes in prison is to impose a punishment he literally cannot bear.
We recognize that such a sentence serves at least in part as an attempt to express the community's sense of outrage and condemnation toward the defendant's conduct and, perhaps, his person. But to respond to a justifiable sense of outrage and injury by pronouncing punishments that cannot actually be inflicted might appear to some a potentially counterproductive expression of impotence, like kicking a tree root over which one has tripped.
This does not mean that we reject respondent's concession of error. In purely arithmetic terms there is a very considerable difference between a life sentence and a sentence of several lifetimes. The Supreme Court itself has detected a potentially different "practical effect" between a life-without-parole sentence and a sentence of life without parole plus 25 years to life. (People v. Shabazz (2006) 38 Cal.4th 55, 70, fn. 9.) It follows that the sentence imposed deviated significantly from the plea agreement.

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