In People v. Bailey, No. 318479, the Court of Appeals held that a trial court does not have discretion to impose a consecutive sentence for multiple counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct (CSC I) when those counts do not arise from the “same transaction.” Even though defendant’s pattern of abuse continued for multiple years, it was a series of discrete acts rather than one transaction, and thus consecutive sentencing was inappropriate. The court remanded for resentencing and affirmed the defendant’s convictions on all four counts of CSC I.
The defendant was convicted of four counts of CSC I stemming from the repeated sexual assaults of his three minor relatives. The first conviction was for a violation of MCL 750.520b(1)(a) and (1)(b), involving a victim under age 13 and a defendant over age 17. The trial court imposed the mandatory minimum sentence for that count consecutive to defendant’s other convictions. On appeal, defendant challenged his convictions based on sufficiency of the evidence, due process violations, evidentiary rulings, prosecutorial misconduct, and ineffective assistance of counsel. Defendant also argued that the trial court did not establish sufficient grounds to justify a departure from Michigan’s typical concurrent sentencing.
The court first addressed defendant’s challenges to his convictions and found no errors in the trial court’s rulings. On defendant’s due process challenge, the court held that the felony information was not overly broad and that the trial court did not err when it did not require greater specificity in the felony information. The court also found defendant’s claims of ineffective assistance of counsel unpersuasive, as defendant failed to demonstrate a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different but for his counsel’s performance.
The court agreed with the defendant, however, that the trial court did not have the discretion to impose a consecutive sentence in these circumstances. Relying on People v. Ryan, 295 Mich. App. 388 (2012), the court noted that consecutive sentencing is allowed only when specifically authorized by statute. The relevant statute in this case, MCL 750.530b(3), permits concurrent sentencing only for criminal offenses “arising from the same transaction.” The court ultimately held that that an ongoing course of sexual abuse involving discrete episodes of assault is not a single transaction. Rather, crimes of the same transaction must be part of a continuous time sequence, not simply a continuous course of conduct.
The dissent would have affirmed the trial court’s sentence. It held that the majority attempted to create a simple, but unworkable, rule to determine what acts are parts of the same transaction, when the test should be a consideration of the totality of the circumstances. The dissent found that defendant had engaged in an unremitting course of conduct that was, at least for some of the acts, part of the same transaction despite occurring over many years. The dissent would therefore have found that a consecutive sentence was appropriate, and would have upheld the trial court’s sentence.
