Court Opinion

ID: 9687663
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 16:41:22.297979+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:29.803771
License: Public Domain

DAVIES, Judge
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent as to the term of probation requiring appellant to serve more than a year in a county jail and as to forced imposition of probation when appellant has requested execution of sentence.
I.
Since the adoption of the Criminal Code in 1963, Minnesota corrections policy has been to limit consecutive time spent in local jails to one year. The Department of Corrections, with its capacity to provide recreation, education, vocational training, chemical dependency treatment, and minimum security facilities has handled all longer incarcerations.
Minnesota Statutes, section 609.105 (1988), states:
Subdivision 1. A sentence to imprisonment for more than one year shall commit the defendant to the custody of the commissioner of corrections.
Subd. 2. The commissioner of corrections shall determine the place of confinement in a prison, reformatory, or other facility of the department of corrections established by law for the confinement of convicted persons and prescribe reasonable conditions and rules for their employment, conduct, instruction, and discipline within or without the facility.
Subd. 3. A sentence to imprisonment for a period of one year or any lesser period shall be to a workhouse, work farm, county jail, or other place authorized by law.
These provisions could hardly be more explicit in drawing the line on jail time at one year. Yet here, by making probationary jail time consecutive, the trial court has sentenced the appellant to spend 20 months in the Chisago County jail, without benefit of Department of Corrections programs.
Not surprisingly, appellant asks relief from his “probation.” He asks that he be turned over to the Department of Corrections to serve a 24-month sentence, as would be required if his sentence is executed and he earns the standard good time credit.
I believe appellant should be turned over to the Department of Corrections pursuant to Minn.Stat. § 609.105, even if he remains under probation.
II.
Appellant also argues that he has a right to reject probation altogether, by choosing execution of his sentence.
Appellant’s claim, first of all, has legislative support in Minnesota Statutes, section 609.135, subd. 7, adopted in 1989.1 That section denies to defendants a right to elect execution of sentence in limited circumstances (when the offender will serve less than nine months in a state institution). The implication is that in other circumstances the defendant has a right to reject probation.
This legislative policy matches our traditional view of probation. Probation is an act of “grace and clemency.” Black’s Law Dictionary 1082 (5th ed. 1979). Forced probation contradicts this fundamental idea. Probation is perverted when used over the offender’s protest and as a device to extend authority over the offender’s life for years beyond the period of permitted incarceration. I think appellant correctly identifies his probation as a more onerous penalty, rather than as an act of “grace and clemency.”
Since State v. Randolph, 316 N.W.2d 508 (Minn.1982), the Minnesota Supreme Court and this court have consistently allowed offenders to demand execution of their sentences. Randolph and all subsequent supreme court and appellate court cases on *528requests for execution of sentence have concluded by holding that, if the defendant insists upon execution of the sentence, the request should be granted.2
The right of execution is not an abstract right, but one predicated upon the idea that a probationary sentence ought not be “more onerous” than any nonprobation sentence. As Randolph pointed out, “the presumptive sentence is the most onerous sentence that should be imposed absent aggravating factors constituting grounds for departure.” 316 N.W.2d at 510 (emphasis added). The supreme court stated further that:
If the presumptive sentence is probation but the trial court attaches conditions of probation that make the probationary sentence more onerous in reality than a prison sentence, then the trial court, in effect, has not followed the Sentencing Guidelines.

Id.

The majority here holds that the probationary sentence is “not more onerous than the executed sentence.” That is not how it is perceived by the appellant. Who is in a better position than the offender to decide whether probation is “more onerous” than the executed sentence?
In making its own determination of onerousness, the majority here makes a first ad hoc evaluation, and starts down the road to a system of judicial review of probationary sentences. Many more cases will follow if this is the road taken. I am unwilling to have this new burden imposed on this court and on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Therefore, I would continue to allow the defendant to reject a “probationary” sentence. I would reaffirm a defendant’s right to demand execution of sentence in all cases where the defendant perceives the conditions of probation to be more onerous than execution of sentence.
Furthermore, I believe the majority misjudges onerousness, if judging onerousness is what the appellate courts are now to do. The test ought not be relative length of incarceration alone, although that is the test applied by the majority. If the supreme court had intended length of jail time to be the exclusive test, it should and would have used the word “longer.” It must have had in mind a more complex idea because it used a more complex term: “onerous.” Here the appellant wants to trade seven years of highly restrictive probation for four months of additional incarceration. That is a rational choice, measured on a scale of intrusiveness, or embarrassment, or economic cost.
Randolph, 316 N.W.2d at 510, in dictum, said forced probation might be justified “when the public interest is served.” The majority here relies on that dictum, which has never before been followed, as a basis for forced probation.
We have here a case of creative sentencing. Creativity to serve “the public interest” is admirable, but “probation” sentences, if unconstrained, could destroy the system of proportionality we seek through guidelines and judicial review of sentencing. Creativity, therefore, must be on the side of “grace and clemency” to be permissible. Otherwise, probation is turned into a device for ratcheting up the penalty.
Furthermore, I believe the majority misjudges what terms of probation serve “the public interest.” Nothing in the record suggests that ten years of restrictive probation will help the appellant defeat his alcoholism. Experience teaches that the end to an individual’s drunk driving comes when recovery from alcoholism begins. To deprive appellant for a decade of an essential economic tool, the power to own and drive a car, seems ill designed to help him remake his life free of alcohol. I would reject this probationary sentence as not in “the public interest.”
Rasinski has not yet served the jail time imposed as a condition of probation and, if *529he had done so, there would still be some four months of additional time which could be served if probation were revoked. He should be able to substitute those four months in the custody of the Department of Corrections for seven additional years of probation. His request for execution of his sentence should be honored.

. Subd. 7. [DEMAND OF EXECUTION OF SENTENCE.] An offender may not demand execution of sentence in lieu of a stay of imposition or execution of sentence if the offender will serve less than nine months at the state institution. This subdivision does not apply to an offender who will be serving the sentence consecutively or concurrently with a previously imposed executed felony sentence.

. See State v. Milbrad, 355 N.W.2d 706, 706 (Minn.1984); State v. Wilwert, 317 N.W.2d 346, 347 (Minn.1982); State v. Murto, 316 N.W.2d 739, 740 (Minn.1982); State v. Smith, 316 N.W.2d 562, 562 (Minn.1982); State v. Randolph, 316 N.W.2d 508, 510-11 (Minn.1982); State v. McElderry, 422 N.W.2d 23, 25 (Minn.App.1988); State v. Sheppheard, 407 N.W.2d 477, 478 (Minn.App.1987); State v. Sutherlin, 341 N.W.2d 303, 306 (Minn.App.1983).