Court Opinion

ID: 9553420
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 19:29:25.300266+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:31:05.078433
License: Public Domain

TOBRINER, J.
I dissent on the ground that the imposition of a consecutive sentence by the trial court, under the facts of this case, constitutes an abuse of discretion. As explained in the opinion prepared by Justice Friedman for the Court of Appeal: “The trial court’s initial and ultimate sentencing choices moved from an extreme of lenience to an extreme of severity, from unsupervised liberty to a deferred imprisonment creating a possibility of a total of 20 years of incarceration and supervised parole. [Fn. omitted.] When each of these extremes is viewed as a means of achieving the goals of criminal sentencing, both could not be ‘right’ for any one offender. Without adding to the extensive literature on sentencing objectives, we need consider only the objective of protecting the public against the offender’s future criminal conduct. Necessarily implied in the judge’s resort to unsupervised probation was a finding that public protection demanded no imprisonment or supervision after completion of the indeterminate Sacramento sentence. Necessarily implied in the judge’s alternative selection was a finding that public protection required 2 to 10 years of imprisonment and supervision additional to the Sacramento sentence. If the goal of public protection *74was satisfied by an order for unsupervised probation, the consecutive prison sentence was harsh and excessive. If the same criterion justified lengthy imprisonment, it utterly vitiated unsupervised probation. No logically relevant sentencing criteria could simultaneously justify both extremes; hence the choice between them had to be personal, subjective and arbitrary.
“A variety of intermediate alternatives were available. Here, however, we review only the exercise of statutory discretion under section 669 and do not engage in general review of sentence suitability. According to the courtroom dialogue, defendant’s rejection of exposure to police search as a condition of probation led the judge to impose a prison sentence. If a sentence concurrent with the existing Sacramento sentence represented a relatively far cry from the judge’s initial proposal, it had at least the virtue of greater proximity to it. A concurrent sentence would permit 2 to 10 years in prison and on supervised parole. The judge rejected it and chose the most extreme and most severe alternative available to him. The court’s selection of the most severe available alternative was not based upon sentencing criteria; rather, it was an expression of the judge’s subjective reaction to defendant’s rejection of probation. The turn from one alternative to another was essentially arbitrary and not an exercise of discriminating judgment within the bounds of reason.”
The majority do not question Justice Friedman’s charge that defendant is being punished primarily not for his crime but for his rejection of the condition of probation. Instead, they seek to justify the expression of the judge’s antagonistic reaction on the theory that he could conclude from defendant’s rejection of the probation condition both an unwillingness to reform and a desire to return to narcotics use.
Thus the majority infer from defendant’s refusal to waive his rights under the Fourth Amendment that defendant seeks to conceal criminal activity. I had thought it settled that a court could never draw an inference of criminal conduct from a defendant’s assertion of his constitutional right. (See Griffin v. California (1965) 380 U.S. 609 [14 L.Ed.2d 106, 85 S.Ct. 1229].) Indeed we have consistently held that a police officer may not infer from a defendant’s refusal to consent to a search that the defendant is concealing evidence of criminal activity. (People v. Wetzel (1974) 11 Cal.3d 104, 109-110 [113 Cal.Rptr. 32, 520 P.2d 416]; People v. Cressey (1970) 2 Cal.3d 836, 841, fn. 6 [87 Cal.Rptr. 699, 471 P.2d 19]; People v. Shelton (1964) 60 Cal.2d 740, 747 [36 Cal.Rptr. 433, 388 P.2d 665]; Tompkins v. Superior Court (1963) 59 *75Cal.2d 65, 68 [27 Cal.Rptr. 889, 378 P.2d 113].) Yet the majority would permit the trial judge to draw this same unconstitutional inference.
Defendant was asked to consent to unannounced, unreasonable and unwarranted searches, at any hour of the day or night, for a period of five years. If defendant prefers to face imprisonment before he will consent to arbitrary government intrusion upon his privacy, such is his constitutional right. A court may not make that preference a basis for inferring that defendant seeks to conceal criminal activity, or a ground for imposing an arbitrary sentence.