Opinion ID: 1909632
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: under sentence of imprisonment aggravator

Text: Next, Taylor argues that the trial court erred in instructing the jury on and in finding the under sentence of imprisonment aggravating circumstance. During the penalty phase, George Brewer, a classification administrator for the Arkansas Department of Corrections, testified that Taylor had not served any time on a twenty-year sentence for a burglary and should have been in the custody of the Arkansas Department of Corrections at the time of the murder. Brewer testified that even under Arkansas's good time policies, Taylor would not have been eligible for parole for at least seven and a half years and thus would still have been under sentence of imprisonment when the murder was committed. Brewer also indicated that it was through no fault of Taylor that the sentence had gone unserved and that Taylor had not been incarcerated at the time of the murder because of administrative errors. The under sentence of imprisonment aggravating circumstance exists when [t]he capital felony was committed by a person previously convicted of a felony and under sentence of imprisonment or placed on community control or on felony probation. § 921.141(5)(a), Fla. Stat. (1999). This aggravator also applies to parolees, mandatory conditional releasees, and control releasees. See Davis v. State, 698 So.2d 1182, 1193 (Fla.1997) (control releasees); Haliburton v. State, 561 So.2d 248, 252 (Fla.1990) (mandatory conditional releasees); Straight v. State, 397 So.2d 903, 910 (Fla.1981) (parolees). Previously, we have found that this aggravating circumstance applied to a defendant who should have been incarcerated at the time he committed murder. See Gunsby v. State, 574 So.2d 1085, 1090 (Fla.1991) (holding under sentence of imprisonment aggravator applied where defendant had been sentenced to incarceration but had not reported to jail as ordered, and a warrant had been issued for his arrest). Similarly, in the instant case, Taylor should have been serving his sentence in Arkansas when the murder occurred. Although there is a culpability distinction between Taylor, who was not serving his sentence because of an administrative mistake, and the defendant in Gunsby, who willingly did not show up to begin serving his sentence, the plain language of the statute does not make such a distinction or require any knowledge on the part of the defendant that he or she is under sentence of imprisonment. Because Taylor should have been serving his sentence when he committed the murder and was under sentence according to the witness from Arkansas Department of Corrections, we find that the trial court did not err in finding this aggravating circumstance.