Court Opinion

ID: 9687754
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 16:46:36.915469+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:31.241998
License: Public Domain

DAVID T. PROSSER, J.
¶ 77. {concurring). In her oral argument to the court, the defendant's attorney, Meredith Ross, proposed the "Bill Gates Rule," which she defined as a rule that no defendant spend more time in custody, pre-sentence and post-sentence, than billionaire Bill Gates would have to spend for the same conduct. In formulating this "rule," Attorney Ross assumed that Mr. Gates would always be able to make bail at the earliest opportunity.
¶ 78. Attorney Ross argued that a failure to apply at least 50 days of sentence credit to each of Johnson's three concurrent sentences meant that Johnson had to spend 46 more days in custody than Bill Gates would have spent, thereby violating the "Bill Gates Rule" and denying Johnson equal protection of the law.
¶ 79. Attorney Ross's ingenious argument is grounded on the questionable premise that showing a disparity between a hypothetical situation and a real situation exposes a violation of equal protection of the law. It may well be that our hypothetical Mr. Gates would have been in a position to post any amount of *55cash bond in any of his three cases if he were in the same position as Johnson. However, a person of Mr. Gates' notoriety would have captured a good deal more attention than Johnson, and thus, there is a good chance that his bond would have been revoked if he had appeared on a second charge of felony drug dealing in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.
¶ 80. In any event, defendants do not have a "right" to concurrent sentences when those sentences arise out of separate, unrelated cases. See Wis. Stat. § 973.155. Concurrent sentences entail an exercise of sound judicial discretion. See Wis. Stat. § 973.15. It was a matter of discretion that Judge William Sosnay made Johnson's sentences in the 2005 case concurrent with his sentence in the first 2004 case. Moreover, it was merely fortuitous that Johnson was sentenced in the first 2004 case by Judge Sosnay rather than Judge Mel Flanagan, the judge who took his plea. This is significant because Attorney Ross did not insist that the "Bill Gates Rule" apply to situations involving different judges.
¶ 81. In effect, Johnson served 50 days for the two felonies in the 2005 case inasmuch as all his post-sentence time on those felonies overlapped the 361 days he served post-sentence on the first 2004 case. This can hardly be described as a severe sentence.
¶ 82. The circuit court might have determined that the hypothetical Mr. Gates, having spent zero time in presentence custody and having badly abused his privileged position by committing additional felonies while on bail, should receive longer sentences in the 2005 case than Johnson did to emphasize the seriousness of his crimes, the protection of the public, and his defiance of the conditions of his pretrial release.
*56¶ 83. The "Bill Gates Rule," if we ever adopted it, would gut a rationally based statute that requires an offender be given credit toward service of his sentence "for all days spent in custody in connection with the course of conduct for which sentence was imposed." Wis. Stat. § 973.155 (2007-08)1 (emphasis added). The "Bill Gates Rule," extended to its logical conclusion, would appear to require that a court stack up the presentence custody from all concurrent sentences from all relevant cases and apply the resulting number of days as credit to all those sentences. But the fact that Mr. Gates would make bail in all his cases, both related and unrelated, would not change the requirement in the statute that credit toward a sentence be tied, factually, to custody in connection with each sentence. See Wis. Stat. § 973.155(l)(a); State v. Floyd, 2000 WI 14, ¶¶ 15-17, 232 Wis. 2d 767, 606 N.W.2d 155; State v. Beiersdorf, 208 Wis. 2d 492, 498, 561 N.W.2d 749 (Ct. App. 1997). The so-called "Bill Gates Rule" must be rejected.
¶ 84. For the reasons stated, I must respectfully concur.

 All subsequent references to the Wisconsin Statutes are to the 2007-08 version unless otherwise indicated.