Opinion ID: 2600391
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Nevada double jeopardy jurisprudence

Text: While we recognize certain divergent developments in federal double jeopardy jurisprudence and sentencing law, today we reaffirm our commitment to the traditional rule articulated in Dolby : When a court is forced to vacate an unlawful sentence on one count, the court may not increase a lawful sentence on a separate count. [27] In Dolby, the defendant was convicted of the attempted murder of an elderly man and sentenced to ten years in prison. The district court also imposed a ten-year enhancement based upon the age of the victim, leading to a total sentence of 20 years. After the sentencing hearing, Dolby brought a motion to correct the sentence, alleging that the enhanced penalty for the attempted murder charge was unlawful. The district court granted the motion and vacated the enhanced penalty, but the court then resentenced Dolby to 20 years on the primary offense of attempted murder. [28] Dolby argued on appeal that the district court violated his double jeopardy rights when it increased the sentence associated with his attempted murder conviction. Relying upon the Lange-Benz rationale, we held that a trial court cannot resentence a defendant to an increased term once the defendant has begun serving the initial sentence. [29] Accordingly, we determined that the increased sentence for attempted murder violated double jeopardy. [30] The State urges this court to reconsider Dolby because the reasoning underlying the rule it articulates is no longer good law. We disagree and continue to adhere to Dolby for three principal reasons. The first reason is chronology. This court decided Dolby in 1990, a decade after the United States Supreme Court issued its DiFrancesco opinion, overruling Lange and Benz. Moreover, the Dolby court cited Lange, Chandler v. United States, [31] and Kennedy v. United States , [32] notwithstanding that DiFrancesco purported to overrule these federal cases. [33] This reliance on cases that formerly underpinned the greater double jeopardy protections that obtained before DiFrancesco strongly indicates that the Dolby court deliberately sought to reserve those protections in the face of DiFrancesco's dismantling influence. We conclude that Dolby operates as an implicit rejection of DiFrancesco. Second, states are free to provide additional constitutional protections beyond those provided by the United States Constitution. [34] In Miranda v. State, for example, this court specifically noted that the showing of necessity required to correct an illegal sentence without violating the Double Jeopardy Clause was more heightened under the Nevada Constitution than its federal counterpart. [35] In other contexts, this court has noted that Nevada law embraces a more expansive interpretation of constitutional rights than federal law. [36] Viewed in this light, our decision to continue to adhere to Dolby is consistent with our past practice of affording more citizen protections under the Nevada Constitution than are afforded under the federal Constitution. Third, while the State summarizes the enervation of double jeopardy protections at the federal level, it fails to offer sound reasons for similarly depleting those protections in Nevada. Most notably, the State fails to offer the very arguments that we would expect to accompany the request for such a change in this court's double jeopardy jurisprudence. For instance, the State fails to argue that the practical realities of sentencing in Nevada have somehow reached extremes of complexity analogous to federal sentencing law. Neither does the State argue that Nevada has ever adhered to the sentencing package doctrine in its federal form. The State has therefore failed to convince this court that the same predicates exist in Nevada for overturning Dolby that, at the federal level, reinforced the paradigm shift in federal sentencing law following DiFrancesco. We hesitate to trade Nevada's double jeopardy protections for a divergent approach whose applicability to Nevada the State has far from completely explained. [37] For these three reasons, we conclude that the rule enunciated in Dolby reflects the heightened citizen protections traditionally afforded under the Nevada Constitution. [38] Accordingly, we reaffirm the core holding of Dolby and decline the State's invitation to alter our double jeopardy jurisprudence. [39] Application of Dolby to Wilson's resentencing Applying Dolby to this case, we conclude that the district court's modification of Wilson's sentence unconstitutionally increased the lawful sentences on those counts which we affirmed on appeal. Initially, the district court sentenced Wilson to 4 terms of 24 to 72 months on the possession counts to run concurrently with 4 consecutive terms of life with the possibility of parole after 10 years on the production counts. Under this sentence, Wilson faced an aggregate minimum sentence of 40 years to life. After this court vacated the three production counts, four possession counts and one production count remained. Thus, Wilson should have been sentenced to an aggregate minimum sentence of ten years on all remaining counts. [40] On remand, however, the district court increased the minimum sentence on the remaining possession counts from 24 to 28 months to run consecutively with one another and with the 10-year term on the remaining production count. After resentencing, Wilson faced an aggregate minimum sentence of 19 years and 4 months. Even though the resentencing did not lead to a harsher result than Wilson's original sentence, the district court individually increased the minimum terms on each of the remaining possession counts and restructured the relationship between the possession counts and the lone production count. We conclude that Dolby forbids this sentencing procedure.