Opinion ID: 1852334
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Whether the Court Was Required to Merge Multiple Offenses Into a Single Offense.

Text: Defendant urges that the district court should have combined multiple counts of theft, fraudulent practices, and forgery into a single offense for purposes of imposing judgment and sentence. He bases his contention on Iowa Code sections 714.3, 714.14, and 715A.7 and on double-jeopardy and double-punishment theories. Section 714.3 (1997) provides in part: If money or property is stolen from the same person or location by two or more acts, or from different persons by two or more acts which occur in approximately the same location or time period so that the thefts are attributable to a single scheme, plan or conspiracy, these acts may be considered a single theft and the value may be the total value of all the property stolen. A similar aggregation provision is contained in section 714.14 with respect to fraudulent-practice offenses. Section 715A.7 involving forgery convictions provides, in part, [t]he court may consider separate verdicts of guilty returned at the same time as one offense for the purpose of sentencing. There are at least two reasons why these statutes do not support defendant's claim that the sentencing judge was required to combine multiple convictions into a single offense. First, the type of statute that sections 714.3 and 714.14 represent involves prosecutorial charging discretion rather than the determination of guilt or sentencing on offenses that have been charged. See State v. Chrisman, 514 N.W.2d 57, 59 (Iowa 1994) (viewing section 714.3 as involving prosecutorial discretion and concluding that the prosecution is not required to accumulate thefts no matter how closely they may be connected). Section 715A.7, although purportedly granting the court authority to combine offenses, is written in a manner that must be interpreted as making that determination discretionary. In the present case, the sentencing judge recognized the existence of these statutes and stated on the record that, if he had authority to aggregate separate counts into single convictions, he declined to do so. A more fundamental reason for rejecting defendant's argument is that it attempts to alter the determination of substantive guilt that was established in the court's findings and judgment following a bench trial. He is arguing that the court must now alter multiple convictions in a manner that the conviction of several offenses now constitutes the conviction of one offense. This argument does not go to sentencing discretion but rather involves the determination of guilt as to separately charged offenses. For that reason, these claims were required to be made in defendant's original appeal and cannot be coupled with the sentencing considerations that the court was required to make on remand. Similarly, defendant may not now urge double-jeopardy and double-punishment arguments that were advanced and rejected at the original appeal.