Court Opinion

ID: 9860137
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 23:11:56.558049+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:18:16.390658
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE REINHARD, specially concurring: While I concur in the affirmance of the judgment of the circuit court, I do not believe that the term “lesser alternative offense” employed by defendant and Justice McLaren serves any useful purpose in the analysis of whether to give a lesser offense instruction. I am uncertain precisely what the term “lesser alternative offense” means as first coined by Justice McLaren in People v. Pedersen (1990), 195 Ill. App. 3d 121, 131-32 (McLaren, J., concurring), nor is his creation of the term “lesser non-included offense” in Pedersen enlightening on this subject. Rather, I rely on the authority of our supreme court in People v. Bryant (1986), 113 Ill. 2d 497, which states the appropriate analysis with respect to an instruction on a lesser offense which is not a lesser-included offense to the offense charged, as follows: “To the extent that the lesser offense must have a broad foundation in the instrument charging the greater, we believe that the indictment in this case set out the main outline of the lesser offense proposed by the defendant here. The property damage to the building was the obvious foundation of the charge; that the indictment did not expressly allege all the elements of the lesser offense is not, in our view, fatal under these circumstances. Notably, in the two cases consolidated in Dace, the lesser offense, theft, was simply named in the charging instruments, and, taken with the evidence introduced at the defendants’ trials, that was found sufficient to warrant instructions on the lesser offenses.” (113 Ill. 2d at 505.) (See also People v. Dace (1984), 104 Ill. 2d 96, 102-03.) Applying that analysis here, solicitation to commit theft does not have a foundation in the charging instrument because theft, or the elements thereof, were never mentioned in the information. I would further point out that this holding in Bryant may have been called into question in People v. Schmidt (1988), 126 Ill. 2d 179, wherein the court stated, “where an accused is charged with a single offense he cannot be found guilty of an offense not charged unless it is a lesser included offense.” (126 Ill. 2d at 184-85; see Pedersen, 195 Ill. App. 3d at 134 (Reinhard, J., dissenting).) Thus, under Schmidt the defendant here is not entitled to an instruction on solicitation to commit theft because it was neither charged nor is it a lesser-included offense. Whether there is a conflict between Bryant and Schmidt is a question which the supreme court may address in a future case.