Court Opinion

ID: 9821681
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 08:21:28.229462+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:38:55.024442
License: Public Domain

CONCURRING OPINION BY
STRASSBURGER, J.:
I join the Majority Opinion. I agree with the Majority that Appellant’s conviction for resisting arrest renders him ineligible for the RRRI program. I also agree that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in not ordering a new PSI report. Finally, I agree that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in sentencing Appellant to 121/ to 25 years of incarceration. I write separately, however, to point out just how much discretion the trial court had in the instant matter.
Instantly, if all of Appellant’s sentences had been ordered to run concurrently, he would have received an aggregate sentence of 21/ to 5 years’ incarceration. As the trial court pointed out, all sentences running consecutively would have resulted in 41 to 82 years’ incarceration. N.T., 10/7/2014, at 38. Either way, for all practical purposes, this Court would be required to affirm Appellant’s judgment of sentence at either end and for anything in between. See Commonwealth v. Klueber, 588 Pa. 401, 904 A.2d 911 (2006) (holding that standard range consecutive sentences are not clearly unreasonable where the *1039trial court relies on the defendant’s prior history and a finding that he was a high risk to re-offend).
This type of virtually unfettered discretion results in similarly situated defendants being treated disparately, a situation our jurisprudence should not countenance.