Opinion ID: 853394
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Walker's Claim

Text: Walker urges that his aggregate sentence of eighty years is manifestly unreasonable. The presumptive sentence for a class A felony is thirty years. Ind.Code Ann. § 35-50-2-4 (West 1998). Twenty years may be added for aggravating circumstances and not more than ten years may be subtracted for mitigating circumstances. Id. The trial court found several aggravating circumstances and no mitigating circumstances. On appeal, Walker argued that his crime constituted a class A felony by virtue of the fact that he was over twenty-one years old, one of several facts that make the crime a class A felony (others include use of a deadly weapon and serious bodily injury). He argued that using age alone to create a class A penalty of eighty years (as opposed, say, to the maximum of forty years for two class B's) was manifestly unreasonable. The Court of Appeals treated this as an assault on the statutory scheme and affirmed the eighty-year sentence, observing that fixing penalties is a legislative function, not a judicial one. Id. (citing Riffe v. State, 675 N.E.2d 710, 712 (Ind.Ct.App. 1996), trans. denied ). This is certainly correct, but not an adequate response to Walker's right to seek sentence review under Article VII, § 4.