Opinion ID: 1635665
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Consideration of pending cases.

Text: The defendant argues that the trial court abused its discretion by considering other pending charges against the defendant even though the record demonstrates a lack of familiarity by the trial court with the substance and basis for such charges and the defendant professed his innocence of such charges, expressly objecting to the trial court's consideration of those charges. The defendant, however, concedes that, in explaining its sentence, the trial court did not state among its reasons the charges pending against the defendant. He argues that it can be presumed that the trial court took the pending charges into consideration in imposing sentence. Such a presumption cannot be drawn in view of this court's admonitions in Jung, supra, and Tuttle, supra . Much of the information concerning the pending charges was brought to the attention of the trial court by the defendant himself. The issue was further explored in response to the defendant's assertion that his record was clean for the three years preceding the present conviction. The trial court was entitled to information which showed that the defendant was not entitled to consideration of this fact as a mitigating factor, in that it was only true to the extent that defendant had no convictions on his record for that period of time. His slate was not completely clean. It does not automatically follow that because of this discussion the trial court must have utilized defendant's pending charges in his sentencing deliberations. The record indicates otherwise. Knowledge of pending charges does not vitiate the sentence where the trial court did not express its opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant in the pending cases or rely on the pending charges in order to impose an increased penalty. Furthermore, even if the trial court took the pending charges into consideration in imposing sentence, under the decisions of this court it was entitled to do so. This court in Waddell v. State, [8] stated that the state attorney: . . . may properly use information relating to complaints of other offenses in his argument on sentence. These complaints are evidence of a pattern of behavior which, in turn, is an index of the defendant's character, a critical factor in sentencing.