Opinion ID: 1958935
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: Single act/single injury theory rejected

Text: Amicus next argues that it is an unsupportable and erroneous extension of the merger doctrine which holds that the same act may never eventuate in more than one punishment. Our decision of this issue is important to a proper disposition of this case because appellant makes a point of arguing that all four of his convictions stem from the same act. Thus, once the prosecution proved that appellant stood in a street in Philadelphia and fired a shotgun at Officer Moriarity, it had proven all the facts necessary to establish aggravated assault, resisting arrest, possession of a prohibited offensive weapon, and carrying a firearm in Philadelphia. Appellant contends that because all four offenses were comprised in a single act, the offenses merged for sentencing purposes. The proposition that a single act will never support more than one punishment can be found in or read into numerous decisions of this Court. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Walls, supra, 303 Pa.Super. at 295, 449 A.2d at 695 (appellant cannot be punished twice . . . for the same act); Commonwealth v. Artis, supra, 294 Pa.Super. at 282-83, 439 A.2d at 1202 (appellant was charged with committing but one act. . . . Therefore he could be sentenced for but one offense); see also Padden, supra ; Sayko, supra ; Laing, supra; Commonwealth v. Bryant, 282 Pa.Super. 600, 423 A.2d 407 (1980); Boerner, supra ; Crocker, supra ; Buser, supra ; Commonwealth v. Lezinsky, 264 Pa.Super. 476, 400 A.2d 184 (1979). Upon a careful review of these cases, we perceive that by and large they state an incomplete version of the proper rule of merger, which is that an individual can be punished only once for a single act which causes only one injury to the Commonwealth. Commonwealth v. Schilling, supra, 288 Pa.Super. at 370, 431 A.2d at 1093. Many of the cases cited seem to omit the emphasized portion of the rule, under the mistaken assumption that a single act necessarily can cause only one injury to the Commonwealth. This idea that a single act can cause but a single injury has very recently met with disapproval in our Supreme Court. The single act/single injury theory is predicated in part on Commonwealth v. Walker, supra , wherein the Supreme Court said, `[w]here there is but one act of cause of injury, or death of a number of persons, there is but one injury to the Commonwealth, but where the acts or causes are separate, they are separate injuries to the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.' 468 Pa. at 331, 362 A.2d at 231 (quoting Commonwealth v. Veley, 63 Pa.Super. 489, 496 (1916)). The Court also stated that it is beyond the power of a court imposing sentence to impose multiple sentences on a defendant for a single act.  468 Pa. at 330 n. 3, 362 A.2d at 230 n. 3 (emphasis added). These statements were supported in the text of the opinion by a line of Pennsylvania Superior Court cases holding that a single act resulting in multiple deaths could support only one conviction for involuntary manslaughter. Accord, Commonwealth v. Zaengle, 332 Pa.Super. 137, 480 A.2d 1224 (1984) (vehicular homicide). Walker was a case where dual punishments had been imposed for rape and statutory rape arising out of a single act of forcible sexual intercourse. Under the applicable statutes as they read at the time, statutory rape was a consensual act of intercourse with a female under the age of sixteen, whereas rape was sexual intercourse with a victim of any age procured through force. Thus, the crimes were mutually exclusive by definition, and the Court correctly found in the case before it that only one injury, forcible invasion of the female's person, had been accomplished by the defendant's single act. Although the Court therefore vacated the statutory rape sentence as duplicitous, the single act/single injury language quoted above simply was not necessary to the holding. The Supreme Court first questioned the soundness of the Walker dicta in Commonwealth v. Norris, 498 Pa. 308, 446 A.2d 246 (1982), when it upheld separate sentences for rape and corruption of the morals of a minor arising from a single act of sexual intercourse. The Court held: Clearly, unlike the situation in Walker, the Commonwealth has suffered two injuries from appellant's single act in that appellant not only engaged in forcible intercourse with an individual who was not his spouse, but also corrupted the morals of a child under the age of eighteen. 498 Pa. at 319, 446 A.2d at 251 (footnotes omitted). Then last year the Supreme Court explicitly overruled the quoted portion of Walker in Commonwealth v. Frisbie, 506 Pa. 461, 485 A.2d 1098 (1984). Frisbie held that nine separate sentences for reckless endangerment could be imposed on a defendant for a single act that injured nine people. The Court stated that in resolving the issue of whether a single act which injures multiple victims can be the basis for multiple sentences, our task is simply to determine whether the legislature intended that each injury constitute a separate offense. Id., 506 Pa. at 466, 485 A.2d at 1100. Upon examining the language of the reckless endangerment statute, the Court concluded that the Legislature clearly intended to prescribe separate punishment for each individual endangered by the single act of a defendant. The Court therefore reversed the holding of the Superior Court which had relied on the single act/single injury theory. Cf. Ladner v. United States, 358 U.S. 169, 79 S.Ct. 209, 3 L.Ed.2d 199 (1958) (single discharge of shotgun wounding two federal officers was single violation of statute making it an offense to use force against a federal officer engaged in performance of official duties; decision based entirely on statutory construction); Commonwealth v. Gray, supra (explaining that State robbery statute comprehends separate punishment for each individual robbed). Frisbie, like Norris and Walker before it, was a decision based solely on the constitutional protection against double jeopardy. Nevertheless, it clearly demonstrated that the Supreme Court considers the permissibility of multiple punishments for a single act to be a question of legislative intent. It also clearly overruled the primary authority upon which this Court has relied for the proposition that multiple punishments for a single act are prohibited. See Commonwealth v. Henck, 329 Pa.Super. 275, 478 A.2d 465 (1984) (dictum); Commonwealth v. Boerner, supra, 281 Pa.Super. at 515 n. 11, 422 A.2d at 588 n. 11; Crocker, supra ; Lezinsky, supra . The erroneous belief that the merger doctrine makes it illegal in all circumstances to impose more than one sentence for a single act is also predicated in part on the seminal case of Commonwealth ex rel. Moszczynski v. Ashe, supra . In that case the Supreme Court first articulated the rule that crimes merge where one necessarily involves the other. In the course of upholding separate sentences for burglary, robbery, and felonious attempt to kill, the Court said in a much-quoted passage: The true test of whether one criminal offense has merged in another is not (as is sometimes stated) whether the two criminal acts are successive steps in the same transaction but it is whether one crime necessarily involves another, as, for example, rape involves fornication, and robbery involves both assault and larceny. The same transaction test is valid only when transaction means a single act. When the transaction consists of two or more criminal acts, the fact that the two acts are successive does not require the conclusion that they have merged. Two crimes may be successive steps in one crime and therefore merge, as, e.g., larceny is merged in robbery, and assault and battery is merged in murder, or they may be two distinct crimes which do not merge. If a defendant commits a burglary and while in the burglarized dwelling he commits the crimes of rape or kidnapping, his crimes do not merge, for neither of them is necessarily involved in the other: When one of two criminal acts committed successively is not a necessary ingredient of the other, there may be a conviction and sentence for both. In the case before us, any one of the three crimes named might have been committed without any of the others being committed and consequently there was no merger of the crimes. 343 Pa. at 104-05, 21 A.2d at 921. Apparently the inference that has sometimes been drawn from Moszczynski is that if two crimes are based on a single act, the same transaction test applies and the crimes merge. See, e.g., Bryant, supra ; Buser, supra . However, the Supreme Court's obvious purpose in the quoted passage was only to refute the mistaken idea that crimes necessarily merge if they are successive steps in the same transaction. The Court declared that no, successive steps do not merge into one crime unless they necessarily involve one another. The same transaction test, the Court said, applies only when transaction refers to a single act. The Court left unstated, however, what this same transaction test was that applied when a single act was involved. For a statement of the same transaction test, we must look to the 1928 case of Commonwealth ex rel. Russo v. Ashe, supra, 293 Pa. at 324, 142 A. at 318: where the distinct crimes set forth grow out of the same transaction, differing only in degree, only one penalty can be imposed after conviction. . . . (Emphasis added). Thus, early on the Supreme Court recognized two similar but distinguishable situations in which various crimes based on a closely related set of facts would merge. First, two crimes that are successive steps merge if they necessarily involve one another. Moszczynski; Commonwealth v. McCusker, 363 Pa. 450, 70 A.2d 273 (1950); see also, e.g., Commonwealth v. Edwards, 302 Pa.Super. 522, 449 A.2d 38 (1982) (successive steps of possession, possession with intent to deliver, and delivery of controlled substance necessarily involve one another, merge); accord, Commonwealth ex rel. Ciampoli v. Heston, 292 Pa. 501, 141 A. 287 (1928); Commonwealth v. Neidig, 340 Pa.Super. 217, 489 A.2d 921 (1985) (petition for allocatur filed). In the second situation, where there has been but a single act, two crimes based on it will merge if they are but different degrees of the same crime. Russo; see also Commonwealth ex rel. Shaddock v. Ashe, 340 Pa. 286, 17 A.2d 190 (1941). Thus, aside from the discredited Walker dicta, the Supreme Court has never suggested that a prosecution based on a single act may never beget more than one punishment. All it has ever said is that multiple punishments are prohibited where the crimes growing out of a single act are merely different degrees of the same crime, or necessarily involve one another, or have harmed only one interest of the Commonwealth. Commonwealth v. Lohr, supra ; Commonwealth v. Walker, supra ; Commonwealth v. Miller, supra ; Commonwealth ex rel. Moszczynski, supra ; Commonwealth ex rel. Russo, supra ; see also Schilling, supra . Even a single act or series of acts may constitute two separate offenses if each offense requires proof of facts additional to or different from those required to prove the other. Commonwealth v. Grassmyer, 266 Pa.Super. 11, 402 A.2d 1052 (1979); Commonwealth v. Ruehling, 232 Pa.Super. 378, 334 A.2d 702 (1975). Commonwealth v. Jackson, 269 Pa.Super. 583, 588, 410 A.2d 854, 857 (Wieand, J., dissenting) (emphasis added).