Court Opinion

ID: 9705756
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:19:37.246177+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:25:39.712206
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE O’MALLEY, specially concurring: I have little doubt that a court should be empowered at any time, whether on direct appeal or not, to correct a criminal sentence not authorized by law. However, the legal reasoning Illinois courts use to reach this conclusion — the idea that such sentences are void for exceeding statutory authorization — seems a vestige of a now-supplanted constitutional scheme. See In re T.E., 85 Ill. 2d 326, 333 (1981) (citing pre-1964 cases for the void-sentence rule); Belleville Toyota, 199 Ill. 2d 325 (explaining that, for nonadministrative cases, the 1964 amendments to the constitution gave courts power over all justiciable matters, so that court actions not authorized by statute should no longer be considered void for lack of jurisdiction). This legal reasoning leaves courts faced with illegal-sentence issues in the uncomfortable position of choosing between binding authority holding that such sentences are void as exceeding statutory authority and equally binding authority holding that lack of statutory authority does not render a decision void. Worse, a court asked to decide whether to extend the special rule for sentencing to a new context must derive its analytical framework from an inscrutable and irreconcilable area of law. My instinct is that courts are correct in their conclusion that illegal sentences may be corrected at any time, but they should update their reasoning to conform with our current constitution. The supreme court has offered that “[cjriminal proceedings that involve the power to render judgments or sentences address a separate set of concerns” not at issue in other cases. Steinbrecher, 197 Ill. 2d at 532.2 This statement implies the idea that, independent of “void” and “voidable” labels and all they connote, there are some matters that a defendant’s basic or constitutional rights require he be allowed to raise at any time, whether on direct appeal or in some collateral proceeding. These rights could be embodied in a new statute or rule, or articulated and explained in new precedent, so that their contours could be more easily identified and the matters to which they extend more easily recognized. As the law now stands, we know that illegal sentences are among the matters defendants may raise at any time, but we have no tenable reason why, nor any framework for determining what other matters should receive similar treatment.  Although the supreme court made this statement, the supreme court has also stated the rule explained in Belleville Toyota in criminal cases. See People v. PH., 145 Ill. 2d 209, 221-22 (1991) (in a decision predating Belleville Toyota, applying the Belleville Toyota rule in a criminal case). Further, the constitution draws no distinction for jurisdictional purposes between civil and criminal cases. I therefore do not understand the supreme court’s statement in Steinbrecher to indicate that the Belleville Toyota rule does not apply in criminal cases.