Com. v. Williams

• Citation: 559 A.2d 25,521 Pa. 556
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, Appellant, v. Leon WILLIAMS, Appellee. *
• Decision Date: 07 March 1989
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Page 25

559 A.2d 25

521 Pa. 556

COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, Appellant, v. Leon WILLIAMS, Appellee. ^*

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Argued Oct. 28, 1988.

Decided March 7, 1989. ^**

Reargument Denied April 25, 1989.

William R. Cunningham, Dist. Atty., William T. Horton, Asst. Dist. Atty., Erie, John J. Trucilla, for appellant.

Bruce L. Getsinger, Schroeck & Segel, P.C., Erie, for appellee.

Before NIX, C.J., and LARSEN, FLAHERTY, McDERMOTT, ZAPPALA, PAPADAKOS and STOUT, JJ.

OPINION OF THE COURT

FLAHERTY, Justice.

This is a Commonwealth appeal by allowance on the question of when convictions of separate crimes merge, for sentencing purposes, because they arise from the same criminal act.

The appellee in this case, Leon Williams, pled guilty to aggravated assault, criminal attempt at robbery and unlawful restraint. These charges arose from an incident on May 30, 1986 in which Williams attacked a 61-year-old woman who was walking her dog. Williams grabbed the victim from behind, choked her and threw her to the ground, beat her, and attempted to rob her. When the victim screamed, neighbors came to help, and Williams ran away before he was able to complete the robbery. Williams was apprehended shortly after the crime and later was positively identified by the victim. The victim suffered a broken nose, fractured skull, fractured foot, black eyes, cuts, bruises, abrasions and psychological trauma.

As indicated above, Williams pled guilty to aggravated assault, criminal attempt at robbery and unlawful restraint. On September 5, 1986 he was sentenced to five to ten years for aggravated assault, a consecutive term of one and a half to ten years for attempted robbery, and a consecutive term of one and a half to five years for unlawful restraint. The total sentence was eight to twenty-five years. Further, Williams was ordered to pay the costs of prosecution and to make restitution of $1,160.10 plus any future medical costs incurred by the victim.

A motion to reconsider the sentence was filed and denied, and Williams took an appeal to Superior Court. Superior Court partially vacated the judgment of sentence and remanded for resentencing on the ground that the unlawful restraint conviction merged with the aggravated assault and attempted robbery convictions for sentencing purposes 368 Pa.Super. 315, 534 A.2d 101. In Superior Court's view, the unlawful restraint of the victim was coextensive with the restraint occasioned by the aggravated assault and the attempted robbery. The court went on to distinguish this case from another case in which the restraint was not coextensive with other criminal acts, but was a separate successive criminal act. The facts of this aggravated assault and this attempted robbery, according to Superior Court, " 'necessarily included' the unlawful restraint involved so that proof of both the aggravated assault and the criminal attempt robbery required proof of the acts upon which the unlawful restraint conviction is predicated." The lower appellate court further determined that the unlawful restraint conviction did not serve a substantially different state interest from the state interests already protected by the assault and attempt convictions:

The aggravated assault conviction and (to a lesser extent) the criminal attempt (robbery) conviction fully vindicate the Commonwealth's interest in protecting individuals from the risk of serious bodily injury and the type and degree of restraint which (in the instant case) the unlawful restraint conviction is intended to vindicate.

Judge Wieand, sitting on the Superior Court panel, disagreed that the unlawful restraint conviction merged with the other convictions. He argued that the crime of unlawful restraint contains the element of restraint, which is not present in the other crimes, and therefore asserted that the crime of unlawful restraint protects a state interest not protected by the other convictions. He thus concluded that the unlawful restraint conviction should not merge with the other convictions.

The Commonwealth petitioned for allowance of appeal from Superior Court's order and this Court granted allocatur to address the question of whether the crimes involved in this case merge for sentencing purposes.

In Commonwealth v. Michael Williams, 514 Pa. 124, 135, 522 A.2d 1095, 1101 (1987), this Court summarized the law of merger as follows:

[M]erger is required only when two prerequisites are met. First, the crimes must "necessarily involve" one another. Second, even if the two crimes necessarily involve one another, they do not merge if there are substantially different interests of the Commonwealth at stake and the defendant's act has injured each interest. To determine whether multiple offenses involve substantially different interests, or how many evils are present in a given criminal act, the sentencing court must examine both the language of the particular statutes and the context in which each statute appears in the Crimes Code.

Superior Court in Commonwealth v. Leon Williams explained when two crimes "necessarily involve" each other as follows:

When courts decide under the merger doctrine that two crimes "necessarily involve" one another, it does not always mean that all the elements of one crime are included in the other. It means that on the facts of the case the two crimes were so intimately bound up in the same wrongful act that as a practical matter proof of one crime necessarily proves the other, so that they must be treated as the same offense. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Jackson, 271 Pa.Super. 131, 412 A.2d 610 (1979); Commonwealth v. Richardson, 232 Pa.Super. 123, 334 A.2d 700 (1975). If the same facts show that practically speaking there was only one offense against the Commonwealth, then the defendant may be punished for only one offense despite the number of chargeable offenses arising out of the transaction.

344 Pa.Super. 108, 125, 496 A.2d 31, 40 (1985).

Crimes "necessarily involve" each other, therefore, if one of two possible scenarios occurs: (1) the crimes have the same elements ¹ (i.e., lesser included offenses), ² or (2) the facts of the case are such that although the elements of the crimes differ, the facts which establish one criminal charge also serve as the basis for an additional criminal charge. An example of this is the case at bar, where the facts of throwing the victim down and beating her simultaneously establish the factual basis for the crimes of aggravated assault and unlawful restraint.

If it is determined that the elements of the crimes charged are the same, or that the same operative facts underlie the crimes charged, the court must then, under the analysis set out in Michael Williams, determine whether the Commonwealth has substantially different interests in prosecuting the defendant for two or more separate crimes. What the court is really asked to do at the second stage of the analysis is make two determinations: (1) what interests of the Commonwealth are at stake in the offenses charged; and (2) how the facts of the case bear on the Commonwealth's interests. The latter point is expressed in our Michael Williams opinion as "how many evils are present in a given criminal act." Id. 514 Pa. at 125, 522 A.2d 1095, 1101 (1987), and in Superior Court's Commonwealth v. Leon Williams, 344 Pa.Super. 108, 143, 496 A.2d 31, 50 (1985) as:

[C]ourts should remember that the test is a flexible, fact-based tool for determining how many offenses against the Commonwealth have actually been committed. Despite the repeated and varied attempts of judges to state one "true test" of merger, the question of merger will often turn on an appraisal of the precise facts of the case.

(Emphasis added).

In other words, at step two a court has to determine exactly how the Commonwealth has been injured (how many "evils" are present) based on the court's understanding of the Commonwealth's interests and the facts of the case. Although we ourselves promulgated this analysis in Michael Williams, we now feel that the analysis is flawed and must be abandoned. There are two things wrong with the Michael Williams merger analysis. First, the interests of the Commonwealth in the enactment of any given criminal statute are difficult to define with any precise degree of certainty. Robbery, for example, may be said to protect property interests, since it appears in a section of the Crimes Code concerning offenses against property. However, robbery may also be said to protect against violence to persons, since a necessary element of robbery is force or the threat of force. Most conservatively, it would seem that robbery protects both interests, but when one says that, one is really doing little more than paraphrasing the words of the statute. The difficulty, then, is that although a court must identify the relevant Commonwealth interests in order to decide whether one crime merges with another, there is no clear way to do this, and if one merely paraphrases the words of each statute as indicative of the Commonwealth's interest, no charges would ever merge if the statutes contained distinct paraphrasable elements. That no charges would ever merge, however, was not what was originally intended, for the analysis began with the possibility that crimes having distinctly different elements might merge.

The second difficulty with our merger analysis as expressed in Michael Williams is that it purports to offer guidance, but it actually offers no guidance at all. Before one can even attempt to state which Commonwealth interests are implicated, one must be able to state "how many offenses against the Commonwealth have actually been committed," Leon Williams, supra, or "how many evils are present in a given criminal act," Michael Williams, supra. But there is no guidance anywhere on how to do this. In the case at bar, for example, one reasonable person might view the throwing down and beating of this victim as two...