Opinion ID: 1704856
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the trial court's refusal to instruct the jury regarding booker's other consecutive sentences

Text: Regarding this first issue, Booker claims that the trial court erred by refusing to inform the jury regarding the consecutive sentences Booker received for his prior burglary, sexual battery, and aggravated assault convictions. After reviewing our prior decisions, we reject Booker's claim on the merits. In Nixon v. State, 572 So.2d 1336, 1345 (Fla.1990), we held that a capital murder defendant, who had been convicted of three additional noncapital offenses carrying lengthy maximum penalties, was not entitled to an instruction informing the jury of the maximum sentences that could be imposed for the other crimes. See also Franqui v. State, 699 So.2d 1312, 1326 (Fla.1997) (following Nixon ); Marquard v. State, 641 So.2d 54, 57-58 (Fla.1994) (same); Gorby v. State, 630 So.2d 544, 548 (Fla.1993) (stating that, according to Nixon, during the penalty phase, there is no need to instruct the jury on the penalties for noncapital crimes a defendant has been convicted of). Booker argues that Nixon is not controlling here because, unlike the defendant in that case, Booker has already been sentenced for the crimes other than the first-degree murder conviction. In making this argument, however, Booker overlooks several of our prior decisions applying Nixon to facts substantively identical to those in this case. In Campbell v. State, 679 So.2d 720, 722 (Fla.1996), the defendant directly appealed a death sentence imposed on him after a resentencing hearing. After finding that the prosecutor had committed various acts of misconduct during the hearing, we reversed the defendant's sentence and again remanded for resentencing. See id. at 724-25. Before doing so, however, we addressed several additional claims to aid in resentencing. Id. at 725. Particularly relevant to this case, we stated: At the time of resentencing, Campbell had already been sentenced to consecutive life terms for other related crimes and now claims that the court erred in preventing him from pointing this out to prospective jurors and in declining to instruct the jury on this. This issue has already been decided adversely to Campbell. See, e.g., Nixon v. State, 572 So.2d 1336 (Fla.1990), cert. denied, 502 U.S. 854, 112 S.Ct. 164, 116 L.Ed.2d 128 (1991). We find no error. 679 So.2d at 725. Thus, in Campbell, we clearly determined that Nixon is controlling in cases such as this. More recently, in Bates v. State, 750 So.2d 6 (Fla.1999), we again applied our holding in Nixon to facts substantively identical to those presented here. In Bates, the defendant appealed from a death sentence imposed on resentencing for a murder that occurred in 1982. See id. at 8. Relevant to this case, we stated the following in rejecting Bates' claim that the jury should have been informed of his previously imposed sentences: [A]ppellant contends that the fact that he was already sentenced to two life terms plus fifteen years and that those sentences were to run consecutively to the sentence for the murder was relevant mitigation in the sense that [it] might serve as a basis for a sentence less than death. We have rejected similar arguments in Franqui v. State, 699 So.2d 1312, 1326 (Fla.1997); Marquard v. State, 641 So.2d 54 (Fla.1994); and Nixon v. State, 572 So.2d 1336 (Fla. 1990). These other sentences are not relevant mitigation on the issue of whether appellant will actually remain in prison for the length of those sentences. The length of actual prison time is affected by many factors other than the length of the sentence imposed by the sentencing court. The introduction of this evidence would open the door to conjecture and speculation as to how much time a prisoner serves of a sentence and distract jurors from the relevant issue of what is the appropriate sentence for the murder conviction. Bates, 750 So.2d at 11. Accordingly, based on our prior decisions, we reject Booker's claim here on the merits.