Court Opinion

ID: 9525672
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:06:08.474554+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:16:18.791614
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE HEIPLE, dissenting: The defendant, Frederick J. Bole, Jr., pleaded guilty to three counts of criminally sexually assaulting his stepdaughter. (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1989, ch. 38, par. 12 — 13(a)(3).) The sexual assaults which were the subject of these convictions took place over an eight-day period, between February 22, 1989, and March 1, 1989. At defendant’s sentencing hearing, the victim testified that defendant had sexual relations with her over 100 times. She stated that defendant fondled her and also had her perform certain sexual acts on defendant whenever the victim’s mother left the house and that these incidents occurred several times a week. The trial judge, finding defendant’s offenses to have been committed in a single course of conduct, which is the operative statutory language which mandates consecutive sentencing, sentenced the defendant to consecutive terms of 10, 10 and 8 years’ imprisonment. The appellate court vacated the sentences and remanded the cause for resentencing, concluding that the defendant’s offenses did not constitute a single course of conduct, and that the trial judge had thus erroneously concluded that the prison terms imposed in this case must run consecutively. (223 Ill. App. 3d 247.) The majority, in affirming the judgment of the appellate court, agrees that defendant’s offenses were not committed in a single course of conduct, and thus, he was not subject to mandatory consecutive sentencing. I respectfully dissent. I believe that defendant’s acts of criminal sexual assault constituted a single course of conduct, thus subjecting defendant to mandatory consecutive sentencing. The basis for the majority’s determination that defendant’s acts of criminal sexual assault were not committed as part of a single course of conduct is that the acts were committed on three separate days. This conclusion will not bear analysis. The phrase “single course of conduct” necessarily includes discrete acts which are separated by the passage of time. They are acts, however, which are conjoined by a common goal or purpose. In the instant case, it was the continuous gratification of defendant’s sexual appetite at the expense of his stepdaughter. That was his single course of conduct. To conclude otherwise is to deprive the phrase of any meaning. By analogy, a bank teller who embezzles money regularly from his cash drawer over an extended period of time is engaging in a single course of conduct even though the defalcations occur on separate days. Similarly, an extorter or a blackmailer who obtains money from his victim on repeated occasions is engaged in a single course of conduct. Just so, the defendant’s conduct in the instant case. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.