Court Opinion

ID: 9697304
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 19:12:36.343521+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:31.310419
License: Public Domain

*92Michael J. Kelly, P.J.
(dissenting). I respectfully dissent.
I must conclude that the trial court improperly scored Offense Variable (ov) 12 at fifty points. In the commentary to Standard 18-4.5 in the chapter relating to sentencing alternatives and procedures of 3 ABA Standards of Criminal Justice (2d ed, 1986), p 298, it is noted that the adoption of the single transaction test has proven easier to state than apply:
As concise and logical as the definition is, it remains doubtful that any legislative phrasing can cut through the Gordian knots in this area. Judicial interpretation will occur in contexts where egregious fact patterns are likely and, thus, where the need to rationalize a desired result is powerful.
I believe the majority has acquiesced in the trial court’s rationalizing a desired result to justify an untoward interpretation of the scoring guidelines in this egregious case.
Defendant was charged in the information with four successive counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and one count of second-degree criminal sexual conduct. The people say that defendant “received the bargain of a lifetime” when he was permitted to plead guilty to one count in return for a dismissal of the four remaining counts involving the sexual abuse of his baby daughter over a period of two years. But there is another side to that coin. If it was a bargain, both sides made concessions. The prosecutor’s concession was that defendant could not be convicted, and hence sentenced, for the four dismissed charges. Defendant could be convicted, and hence sentenced, only on the crime charged. That is not to say that *93outside conduct could not be scored, but courts have to adhere to rules of interpretation applicable to legislation. We do not knock aside rules of construction and twist plain English by Humpty Dumpty fiat. The sentencing guidelines provisions for ov 12 applicable to sexual penetrations provide:
CRIMINAL SEXUAL PENETRATION(S)
OV 12
50* 2 or more criminal sexual penetrations
25* 1 criminal sexual penetration
0 No criminal sexual penetration
Score all penetrations involving the offender arising out of the same criminal transaction
*In CSC 1st and CSC 3rd do not score the one penetration that forms the basis of the conviction offense.
There is no reasonable justification for calling numerous instances of criminal sexual conduct over a two-year period the same criminal transaction. The defendant was not charged with “numerous criminal sexual penetrations over a two-year period.” He was charged in five specific counts. There is no such count or crime entitled “years of molestation.” Not even the tortured exegesis of the mind of a medieval monk can deduct four from five and come up with years of molestation. For what little it is worth, I think People v Polus, 197 Mich App 197, 199; 495 NW2d 402 (1992), was correctly decided. The Supreme Court could not muster the votes to grant leave on an application, 447 Mich 952 (1994), and we should not supply their missing votes.
In conclusion, I believe it is unseemly to couch appellate decision-making in language posturing *94indignation at the crimes and criminals on review, torturing support for the interpretation that results in the longest durance for the criminal. If the prosecutor here wanted two, three, four, or five convictions and the resulting sentencing consequences, he need not have entered into a bargain for one conviction. The result reached in Polus was eminently correct; the instruction on its face limits consideration to penetrations involved in the same criminal transaction. Prior criminal sexual penetrations between the defendant and the victim were scored under ov 25, and properly so. If the trial court concluded that ov 25 inadequately addressed the importance of prior penetrations, it had authority to exceed the guidelines with very little risk of reversal by way of appellate review, but that is another subject.
The precedential effect of People v Warner, 190 Mich App 26; 475 NW2d 397 (1991), need not be decided. I have stated my view on Warner in a concurrence in Polus. Warner could have been decided on another ground and the issue was not precedential to the determination of the case. People v Case, 220 Mich 379, 383; 190 NW 289 (1922).
I would confirm the result and hence the precedential effect of People v Polus, supra. I would reverse the circuit court’s judgment of sentence.