Court Opinion

ID: 9544984
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:04:18.098396+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:13:50.543475
License: Public Domain

Foth, C.J.,
concurring: I concur in the court’s opinion but would add a few words touching the issue raised in the dissent.
I view the unauthorized sentence of August 24, 1981, as no different from any other unauthorized sentence. Presumably every sentence imposed by every judge is thought by the judge at the time to be proper and authorized by law. Further, the sentencing judge must necessarily find, at least implicitly, all the underlying jurisdictional facts necessary to support the judgment rendered.* Nevertheless, judges are sometimes wrong, and when *176their error is brought to their attention they have specific authority to remedy the error “at any time” by correcting the “illegal” sentence. K.S.A. 22-3504(1).
Res judicata (along with collateral estoppel) has a place in the criminal law, notably to protect the defendant’s Fifth Amendment guaranty against double jeopardy. See generally, In re Berkowitz, 3 Kan. App. 2d 726, 733-43, 602 P.2d 99 (1979)., Here, as the court’s opinion points out, there is no double jeopardy problem. On the other side of the coin, defendants may and frequently do relitigate jurisdictional factual questions (among the most common being “voluntariness” of guilty pleas, confessions, and consents to search) even though such questions have been expressly adjudicated against them after being hotly contested. I foresee no dire consequences in permitting the State to show that a court’s previous assumption of fact made in the absence of any evidence was erroneous where, as here, no constitutional rights of the defendant are involved.
The people of the State have an interest in seeing that sentences imposed are within the limits set by their representatives in the legislature. The sentence originally imposed was the minimum authorized by the legislature. The later effort to further reduce the sentence was, in the sense of K.S.A. 22-3504(1), “illegal.” The later order was therefore properly set aside and the original sentence properly reinstated.

 In this case the authority of Dr. Targownik to speak for the secretary of corrections was not a finding orally expressed by the trial judge at the time of the sentence reduction. It appears in the record only in the Journal Entry prepared by defense counsel.