Court Opinion

ID: 9667001
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:32:26.275112+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:34.010174
License: Public Domain

Caporale, J., dissenting.
I respectfully dissent; it seems to me that a criminal defendant ought not be able to have the excessiveness of his or her sentence reviewed by this court and then, upon its affirmance, ask the sentencing court to reconsider the sentence and reduce it. A defendant who puts the sentence at issue before an appellate court should be treated as having waived any right for later reconsideration of the sentence by the inferior sentencing court; once an appellate court passes upon a *385sentence, the sentence should be treated as the judgment of that court, and the only power an inferior court should acquire over it is to enforce it as affirmed. See In re Caruba, 142 N. J. Eq. 358, 61 A.2d 290 (1948), cert. denied 335 U.S. 846, 69 S. Ct. 69, 93 L. Ed. 2d 396. See, also, State v. Kowalczyk, 3 N.J. 231, 69 A.2d 718 (1949); Stowe v. Superior Court, 72 Cal. App. 174, 236 P.985 (1925).
Under the statutory interpretation announced today, a criminal defendant will be able first to ask this court to review his sentence and, if we find it to be not excessive, later ask us to review the sentencing court’s subsequent refusal to reduce it. In my view, such a result makes no procedural sense and is not compelled by the statutory language.
The provision of Neb. Rev. Stat. § 29-2308.01 (Cum. Supp. 1988) empowering a sentencing court to reduce its sentence “within one hundred twenty days after ... receipt by the court of a mandate issued upon affirmance of the judgment or dismissal of the appeal” does not address cases in which the sentence has been called into question before the appellate court. As I read the statute, it contemplates that a sentencing court retains power to reduce a sentence after appellate review only if sentencing issues were not put before the appellate court. Thus, sentencing issues would be reviewed by this court once and only once. I submit that such a construction is logical and fulfills our obligation to construe a statute as if the Legislature intended a sensible, rather than an absurd result. Commerce Sav. Scottsbluff v. F.H. Schafer Elev., 231 Neb. 288, 436 N.W.2d 151 (1989).