Opinion ID: 776953
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Intrajurisdictional Comparison

Text: 41 Nor does the length of Bray's and Brown's sentences change the result of the intrajurisdictional comparison performed in Andrade. Bray and Brown could each have been sentenced for up to three years in prison under Section 666 for their single petty theft convictions, in light of their prior records, while Andrade could have been sentenced for up to six years for his two petty thefts. A 25-year minimum sentence bears the same relationship to the usual three-year sentence for Bray's and Brown's crimes as a 50-year minimum does to the usual six-year sentence. See Andrade, 270 F.3d at 761. 42 Further, the violent crimes to which Andrade compared the 50-year sentence — second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, rape, and sexual assault on a minor — all carry sentences considerably less than 25 years to life. See id. at 761-62. Moreover, defendants who commit the same crimes as Brown and Bray and whose records include serious or violent crimes but no theft convictions can be punished under California law by no more than six months in jail. See § 666. So Bray and Brown were sentenced to higher terms than criminals who commit serious violent crimes, and than criminals who commit the same crime and have a comparable past record of violent or serious crime. 43 Additionally, Andrade must necessarily have based its intrastate comparison on one 25-year-to life sentence rather than two; otherwise, the comparison should have been to two convictions for violent crimes, which it was not. See 270 F.3d at 761-62. Because Bray and Brown received indeterminate life sentences for one petty theft conviction although they could not have been so sentenced for many violent crimes, their sentence, if anything, is more disproportionate on an intrajurisdictional basis than was Andrade's. 44 Bray's and Brown's sentences, we recognize, do not have the distinguishing feature of Andrade's sentence, which was twice as long as that of most petty theft offenders sentenced under Three Strikes. But again, Andrade was sentenced for two, entirely distinct offenses. Anyone sentenced under Three Strikes for two petty thefts with priors would have received the same sentence. Any lack of similar sentences, then, must have been because no one else was sentenced for two such petty thefts under Three Strikes, not because others who were sentenced for similar crimes received lesser sentences. 45 The State nonetheless maintains that because a few hundred other defendants have been sentenced to 25 years to life under Three Strikes with the triggering offense of petty theft, the sentence is not disproportionate. As Andrade held, this approach is less than convincing, because it attempts to justify the constitutionally-suspect application of a statute by pointing to other applications of the same statute. Id. at 762. In other words, that a sentence is imposed frequently, while relevant to proportionality analysis, cannot be the determining factor, as the protections of the Eighth Amendment are not reserved only for aberrant situations. If, for example, the state decided to chop off the hands of everyone convicted of speeding, the likely conclusion that such a sentence is cruel and unusual would not change because the state inflicted it on many people. Thus, while a comparison between a particular defendant's sentence and that imposed on other recidivists may sometimes be informative, as it was in Andrade, such comparison is neither necessary nor, if one discovers only that others have been similarly sentenced under the same statute, entitled to much weight.