Opinion ID: 1192048
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The SRA and Equal Protection

Text: Lewis argues that the SRA violates his equal protection rights. He reasons that although the statute appears fair on its face, it is applied arbitrarily. See, e.g., Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356, 30 L.Ed. 220, 6 S.Ct. 1064 (1886). He argues that because the State can arbitrarily decide how many counts will be used to set the offender score, Brief of Appellant, at 32, this is an arbitrary classification of a crime and not based on differences that are real in fact and reasonably related to the general purposes of criminal legislation. State v. Mason, 34 Wn. App. 514, 663 P.2d 137 (1983). We reject this argument. [5] In Mason, the Court of Appeals held that a statute violated the equal protection provision of the state constitution when two laws defining the same criminal conduct, one state and one local, provided different penalties. This violated the constitution because the prosecutor could prosecute under either law and reach a different punishment for the exact same conduct. In contrast, the underlying premise of the SRA is to treat similar types of criminals uniformly in the sentencing stage. All defendants who have current or prior convictions are similarly situated in the calculation of their offender score. The SRA establishes classifications of criminal sentencing into which defendants are categorized based upon their criminal offender score. There is no unequal application of the SRA standards on some invidious basis as there was in Yick Wo.