Court Opinion

ID: 9860138
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 23:11:56.563638+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:18:17.102822
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE GEIGER, specially concurring: Subject to the following exception I join in Justice Reinhard’s special concurrence. Like Justice Reinhard, I disagree with Justice McLaren’s term “lesser alternative offense”; rather, I believe that it is more appropriate to look to the criteria set forth in People v. Bryant (1986), 113 Ill. 2d 497, with consideration of People v. Schmidt (1988), 126 Ill. 2d 179. I would emphasize that in the context of determining whether the defendant was entitled to an instruction on a lesser offense, the Bryant court did not simply give a traditional included offense analysis of the offense charged by the charging instrument. Rather, the court in Bryant looked to whether the lesser offense had a broad foundation in the charging instrument and whether the evidence presented at trial could have rationally sustained a conviction of the lesser offense and an acquittal of the greater. See 113 Ill. 2d at 503-06. As Justice Reinhard points out, the later Schmidt decision stated that a defendant could be convicted of only a charged offense or a lesser-included offense of a charged offense (126 I9ll. 2d at 184-85). However, in doing so it made no mention of Bryant or the Bryant discussion of the meaning of “included offense” in this context. Consequently, I would not find, as Justice Reinhard implies, that Bryant’s apparently broad interpretation of “included offense” is moribund. Since the record in this appeal fails to satisfy the requirements set forth in Schmidt or the broader test in Bryant, I concur that the trial court should be affirmed.