Court Opinion

ID: 9726988
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 13:15:58.646807+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:32.490349
License: Public Domain

Justice NIGRO
concurring.
While I agree with the majority’s ultimate conclusion that Appellant Taboo Bradley was properly sentenced under the “three strikes” provision of the Sentencing Code, 42 Pa.C.S. § 9714(a)(2), I write separately to address what the majority calls Appellant’s “recidivist philosophy-based argument.” Op. at 1135.
Here, as the majority notes, Appellant was convicted of two armed robberies in 1991, and did not commit the aggravated assault at issue here until eight years later, in 1999. Given these circumstances, where Appellant had eight years to rehabilitate himself but opted not to, I agree with the majority that Appellant was properly given an enhanced sentence.
Such was not the case, at least in my view, in Commonwealth v. Vasquez, 562 Pa. 120, 753 A.2d 807, 808 (2000). There, an undercover police officer bought cocaine from the appellee on four separate occasions, but only arrested him after the last transaction. The appellee pled guilty to two counts of delivering cocaine and the trial court sentenced the appellee on the first count, and then applied 18 Pa. C.S. § 7508(a)(3)(i), which enhances a defendant’s sentence if he *157has been convicted of another drug trafficking offense at the time of his sentencing, to the second count. Notwithstanding the fact that the appellee’s first and second count arose from a single arrest, a majority of this Court held on appeal that the appellee had properly been sentenced pursuant to the sentencing enhancement provision at § 7508(a)(3)(i). I dissented, primarily because I believed that a sentencing enhancement provision should not apply to defendants, such as the appellee in Vasquez, who have not been given a chance to rehabilitate themselves. Id. at 812.
Unlike the appellee in Vasquez, however, Appellant did in fact have an adequate opportunity to rehabilitate himself given that a period of eight years lapsed between his first two convictions and his third conviction. As such, I agree with the majority that Appellant was properly sentenced under the three-strikes law, and I am therefore able to join in the result reached by the majority.