Opinion ID: 2168366
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the legality of appellant's sentence

Text: Appellant's second issue concerns the legality of the trial court's imposition of one year of unsupervised probation. Appellant contends that the trial court had no authority under D.C.Code § 16-710(a) to order probation after suspending imposition of sentence. Ms. Little has now completed the one year of unsupervised probation. Moreover, she did not raise any questions in the trial court regarding the legality of her sentence. Nor did she ever file a motion to vacate an illegal sentence. Despite Ms. Little's failure to raise any question about her sentence in the trial court, the government asks us to resolve the issue as to whether a trial judge may place a defendant on probation without imposing sentence because this practice is prevalent in the Superior Court. We decline to rule on this issue based on the record before us. The trial court has never addressed the issue. In Miller v. Avirom, 127 U.S.App.D.C. 367, 369-70, 384 F.2d 319, 321-22 (1967) (footnotes omitted) the court said: In our jurisprudential system, trial and appellate processes are synchronized in contemplation that review will normally be confined to matters appropriately submitted for determination in the court of first resort. Questions not properly raised and preserved during the proceedings under examination, and points not asserted with sufficient precision to indicate distinctly the party's thesis, will normally be spurned on appeal. Appellant candidly admitted during oral argument that the legality of sentence issue never was presented to the trial court. [5] We are constrained to avoid decision on an issue which has never been aired before the trial court. Accordingly, the conviction on appeal is Affirmed.