Court Opinion

ID: 9620809
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 05:48:04.628803+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:37:11.137508
License: Public Domain

Judge JOHNSON
concurs in part; dissents in part.
I respectfully dissent as to the majority’s affirmance of the sentence imposed on defendant Cannon and concur as to the remainder of the opinion. I believe defendant Cannon is entitled to a new sentencing hearing because the trial judge decided before trial the sentence he should receive.
*256Prior to the start of trial, the trial judge called both defense attorneys and the prosecutor to the bench. Upon learning that defendants had rejected a plea bargain offer and intended to go to trial, the judge said to the defense attorneys in the most vehement language that if defendants determined to go to trial and were convicted, he would give them the maximum sentence.
At a later point during this discussion at the bench, the judge stated that he would sentence defendant Cannon to not less than thirty-five years if convicted. As the majority notes, the judge subsequently stated during trial that he hoped both defense attorneys had advised their clients of the sentences he intended to give if they were convicted. After conviction the judge gave defendant Cannon a thirty-five year sentence, exactly as promised.
In the case of defendant Redmond, the trial judge ultimately handed down a considerably shorter sentence than the forty years he threatened before trial. Therefore, I do not dissent as to defendant Redmond.
In North Carolina a convicted criminal defendant is entitled to a hearing for the purpose of sentencing. G.S. sec. 15A-1334(a). At the hearing the defendant and prosecutor may present witnesses and arguments relevant to sentencing. G.S. sec. 15A-1334(b). It is at this point, when all the evidence of possible aggravating and mitigating factors is presented, that it is appropriate for a trial judge to determine sentence. See G.S. sec. 15A-1334.
Our Court has stressed in State v. McRae, 70 N.C. App. 779, 320 S.E. 2d 914 (1984), the importance of a convicted criminal defendant’s receiving a meaningful sentencing hearing. The trial judge in McRae informed the defendant a month before the sentencing hearing of the sentence he would receive. In vacating defendant’s sentence and remanding for a new sentencing hearing, this Court indicated that the trial judge had foreclosed defendant’s right to have a meaningful sentencing hearing and thereby frustrated the purpose of the Fair Sentencing Act. Id.
When the trial judge in the case sub judice first told defendant Cannon’s attorney that Cannon would receive a thirty-five year sentence, the judge had not heard the evidence at trial and *257was aware only of one aggravating factor, a prior conviction. It was not until the sentencing hearing after trial that defendant Cannon offered evidence of a mitigating factor which was accepted by the court. I cannot conclude that the judge arrived at defendant Cannon’s sentence solely on the basis of weighing the aggravating and mitigating factors since he had predicted the same sentence even before trial. Defendant Cannon may have received a reasonable sentence. However, the process of finding aggravating and mitigating factors under the Fair Sentencing Act should not be used as a means of substantiating a sentence reached in part because of the trial judge’s ire directed toward a defendant for exercising his constitutional right to go to trial, as the evidence in this case suggests.
In State v. Boone, 293 N.C. 702, 239 S.E. 2d 459 (1977), our Supreme Court stated that “[n]o other right of the individual has been so zealously guarded over the years and so deeply embedded in our system of jurisprudence as an accused’s right to a jury trial.” Id. at 712, 239 S.E. 2d at 465. In support of this fundamental right, I must respectfully dissent from the majority’s affirmance of defendant Cannon’s sentence.