Court Opinion

ID: 9593301
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:21:23.609199+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:01:19.989565
License: Public Domain

LANE, Presiding Judge,
concurring in result.
I agree with the majority that the instant matter should be affirmed. However, I do not believe that Grady v. Corbin, 495 U.S. 508, 110 S.Ct. 2084, 109 L.Ed.2d 548 (1990), has any application at all to this case. In Grady, and the cases relied upon therein, there were two separate prosecutions. The defendant was first prosecuted for drunk driving and being left of center and entered his plea prior to the time the subsequent charges were filed. We do not have that scenario. In our situation all of the offenses are charged in one prosecution by means on a multiple count Information. Appellant himself separated out the count on the possession of the sawed-off shotgun when he entered a plea of guilty to that charge. To hold that Grady applies would allow every defendant charged with more than one count to choose the least count to enter a plea of guilty and prevent prosecution of all of the remaining counts.
My view of the application of Grady to this matter finds support in Ohio v. Johnson, 467 U.S. 493, 104 S.Ct. 2536, 81 L.Ed.2d 425 (1984). There, Johnson was charged with murder, aggravated robbery, involuntary manslaughter and theft. He entered pleas of guilty to the last two charges and then claimed that jeopardy barred the prosecution of the first two. The Supreme Court found that even though the manslaughter charge was a lesser included offense of the murder charge and that theft was a lesser of aggravated robbery the State of Ohio was not precluded *993from prosecuting the remaining charges by the jeopardy prohibition. In the event of a conviction on the remaining charges, the Ohio courts would have to then face the problems of double punishment, but the guilty pleas are not a bar from further prosecution.
A distinction was made by the Court where a defendant is charged in one instrument with more than one count and where a defendant stands convicted of a charge and is later prosecuted for other crimes arising out of the same incident. The Court distinguished Johnson from Brown v. Ohio, 432 U.S. 161, 97 S.Ct. 2221, 53 L.Ed.2d 187 (1977), the principal case relied on in Grady. It is the same distinction that I would draw here: where multiple counts are charged in a single prosecution a plea to one or more of the counts does not bar further prosecution on remaining counts, but if a prosecution has been completed prior to the filing of subsequent charges the principals of double jeopardy apply.
Because the principals established in Grady do not have any application in this case, I see no reason to go into the extensive discussion of the rules against successive prosecutions. Without a factual basis for the issue in the present case, the portion of the court’s opinion is merely dicta without precedential value.
Therefore, I concur in the result reached by the majority but for the reasons stated herein.