Court Opinion

ID: 9634194
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 13:03:58.073549+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:08:58.002008
License: Public Domain

CONCURRING AND DISSENTING STATEMENT BY
McEWEN, P.J.E.:
¶ 1 While the Opinion of the majority reveals a careful analysis and a persuasive expression of rationale, and while I agree that the sentence imposed on appellant must be vacated, I am nonetheless compelled to the view that, upon remand, appellant should be sentenced as a second-time offender, and not as a third-time offender.
¶ 2 The purpose of habitual criminal legislation, as I see it, is to impose a further penalty upon those hardened and incorrigible criminals who have been unaffected by prior punishment. Commonwealth v. Dickerson, 404 Pa.Super. 249, 590 A.2d 766, 771 (1991), aff'd, 538 Pa. 294, 621 A.2d 990 (1993). The record reveals that appellant, prior to his conviction in the present case, had entered, in a single proceeding, a consolidated guilty plea to three burglaries, and received a consolidated sentence as well, since he received three concurrent sentences of from eleven and one-half to twenty three months imprisonment. As the trial judge noted in his Opinion, and the majority accepted, this earlier sentence was appellant’s first and only prior contact with the criminal justice system. Simply put, I am unable to so widely cast the net of incorrigibility that it will pull appellant into the penitentiary for 25 years, since I do not believe that at the time of his sentencing in this case, appellant was incorrigible and subject to the harsher provision of Section 9714(a)(2).