Court Opinion

ID: 9755204
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 20:30:05.054071+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:04.912891
License: Public Domain

McDERMOTT, Justice,
dissenting.
The majority, by so precipitously overruling the recent case of Comm. v. Michael Williams, 514 Pa. 124, 522 A.2d 1095 (1987) is offering an invitation to a bargain sale of *568criminal justice, where they may be offering three or more crimes for the price of one.
We live under an elaborate scheme of laws designed to protect our persons and property. The legislature may proscribe punishment for whatever may not be constitutionally prohibited. They may order punishment as they see fit for any act they condemn. They may make each separate step toward an offense an offense in itself. They may protect different interests by making the same acts punishable for violating the separate interests that they perceive. In arson, for instance, they make the burning of a building a crime in itself. They may also make the burning a separate crime in that it endangers others, including the hands that come to help. In short, they proscribe the burning of a building as a crime, and because a burning building endangers others they have made that a crime in itself. By doing so they have identified two distinct interests violated by the same act of burning for which they have set separate penalties. One could say that when one is convicted of arson, the endangering aspect is merged into the arson, the greater of the two offenses. That sortie of reasoning can be spread across the whole spectrum of criminal law until every act is subsumed by accomplishing the greater of all offenses committed along the way. If two or more conspire to rob a bank and they do, then according to this theory the conspiracy, burglary, weapons offenses, thefts of cars, holding of hostages and assaultive acts to force the robbery are all subsumed by the accomplished robbery.
Because such .a sortie of reasoning is possible and perhaps even attractive to many for various reasons, as the Superior Court thought in this case. Their reasons being the “practicality” of the case.
When courts decide under the merger doctrine that two crimes “necessarily involve” one another, it does not always mean that all the elements of one crime are included in the other. It means that on the facts of the case the two crimes were so intimately bound up in the *569same wrongful act that as a practical matter proof of one crime necessarily proves the other, so that they must be treated as the same offense. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Jackson, 271 Pa.Super. 131, 412 A.2d 610 (1979); Commonwealth v. Richardson, 232 Pa.Super. 123, 334 A.2d 700 (1975). If the same facts show that practically speaking there was only one offense against the Commonwealth, then the defendant may be punished for only one offense despite the number of chargeable offenses arising out of the transaction.
344 Pa.Super. 108, 125, 496 A.2d 31, 40 (1985). It was for this reason that we carefully laid down the rule in Comm, v. Michael Williams, supra, that the question is not one of practicality but an examination of the interests sought to be protected by the criminal statute.
Merger is required only when two prerequisites are met. First, the crimes must “necessarily involve” one another. Second, even if the two crimes necessarily involve one another, they do not merge if there are substantially different interests of the Commonwealth at stake and the defendant’s act has injured each interest. To determine whether multiple offenses involve substantially different interests, or how many evils are present in a given criminal act, the sentencing court must examine both the language of the particular statutes and the context in which each statute appears in the crimes code.
Comm. v. Michael Williams, 514 Pa. at 135, 522 A.2d at 1101.
A person can therefore commit several different offenses while doing the same act. It is not our business to say that the legislature may not define different crimes, protecting different discrete interests from the same acts committed at the same time. Where one sets out on a criminal enterprise, all that they do may be prohibited as separate and distinct offenses and they may be guilty of each. A court may use all the penalties or any one as a proper punishment. The name, however, they put on the acts committed *570should, at the very least, reflect the legislature’s right to call those acts a crime.
LARSEN, J., joins in this dissenting opinion.