Commonwealth v. Wolfe
| Decision Date | 20 June 2016 |
| Docket Number | No. 68 MAP 2015,68 MAP 2015 |
| Citation | 140 A.3d 651 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, Appellant v. Matthew Bryan WOLFE, Appellee. |
| Court | Pennsylvania Supreme Court |
Hugh J. Burns, Jr., Esq., Philadelphia, for Pennsylvania District Attorney's Association, amicus curiae.
Peter Rosalsky, Esq., Defender Association of Philadelphia, for Defender Association of Philadelphia, amicus curiae.
Andrew Travis LeFever, Esq., Susan E. Moyer, Esq., Craig William Stedman, Esq., Lancaster County District Attorney's Office, for Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Todd Everett Brown, Esq., MaryJean Glick, Esq., Lancaster County Public Defender's Office, Leonard Sosnov, Esq., Harrisburg, for Matthew Bryan Wolfe.
Chief Justice Saylor also authored Part II(A), which is joined by Justice Donohue. Justice Baer files a concurring opinion pertaining to Part II(A), joined by Justice Wecht. Justice Todd files a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Dougherty, and Justice Dougherty files a separate dissenting opinion.
OPINION
.1
Appeal was allowed to assess the validity of the Superior Court's sua sponte determination that a sentencing statute is facially unconstitutional under Alleyne v. United States, ––– U.S. ––––, 133 S.Ct. 2151, 186 L.Ed.2d 314 (2013)
.
In August 2012, Appellee, an eighteen-year-old male, engaged in sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl on several occasions. He was charged with and convicted in a jury trial of a number of sexual offenses, including two counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse under Section 3123(a)(7) of the Crimes Code
, 18 Pa.C.S. § 3123(a)(7). This statute prescribes, as a general rule, that it is a felony of the first degree to engage in deviate sexual intercourse with a complainant who is less than sixteen years of age. See id.
During Appellee's trial and prior to sentencing, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its Alleyne decision, overruling its own prior precedent and establishing a new constitutional rule of law, grounded on the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. See Alleyne, ––– U.S. at ––––, 133 S.Ct. at 2162–63
. The Alleyne Court held that any fact that, by law, increases the penalty for a crime must be treated as an element of the offense, submitted to a jury rather than a judge, and found beyond a reasonable doubt. See
id. at ––––, 133 S.Ct. at 2163. The opinion also explained that the requirement to treat factors triggering at-law mandatory sentencing enhancements as offense elements “enables the defendant to predict the legally applicable penalty from the face of the indictment.” Id. at ––––, 133 S.Ct. at 2161.
The effect of Alleyne 's new rule was to invalidate a range of Pennsylvania sentencing statutes predicating mandatory minimum penalties upon non-elemental facts and requiring such facts to be determined by a preponderance of the evidence at sentencing. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Hopkins, –––Pa. ––––, ––––, 117 A.3d 247, 262 (2015)
().
Among a litany of other prescriptions for mandatory minimum sentences, Section 9718(a)(1) of the Sentencing Code requires imposition of a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence for IDSI crimes, where the victims are less than sixteen years of age. See 42 Pa.C.S. § 9718(a)(1)
. Of particular relevance here, the statute specifies that its provisions “shall not be an element of the crime,” and that the applicability “shall be determined at sentencing,” with factual matters being resolved by the sentencing court “by a preponderance of the evidence.” Id. § 9718(c). Both the directive that a sentencing factor establishing a mandatory minimum sentence is not an element of a crime and the allocation of decision-making authority relative to such factor to a judge contravene Alleyne.
Hopkins, ––– Pa. at ––––, 117 A.3d at 257–58. Section 9718 also does not require the Commonwealth to provide notice that it intends to pursue the mandatory minimum sentence before trial, but rather, prescribes only that such notification must be furnished after conviction and before sentencing. See 42 Pa.C.S. § 9718(c). Again, the absence of a requirement for pretrial notice of aggravation is in substantial tension with Alleyne. See
Hopkins, ––– Pa. at ––––, 117 A.3d at 258. Significantly, however, at least for purposes of the arguments presented in this appeal, the statute's proclamation that the age-of-the-victim factor is not an offense element is anomalous, since the victim's age is, in fact, encompassed within IDSI offenses under Section 3123(a)(7)
, under which Appellee was convicted.
In October 2013, the sentencing court imposed mandatory minimum sentences of ten years upon Appellee for each IDSI offense, albeit that the court specified that those sentences would run concurrently. The record contains no evidence that the sentencing court conducted any independent inquiry or assessment relative to determining the victim's age, as directed by Section 9718(c)
. Appellee pursued relief in a direct appeal; however, he did not raise a challenge to his sentences under Alleyne.
Nevertheless, the Superior Court invoked Alleyne sua sponte, vacated the judgments of sentence, and remanded for resentencing. See Commonwealth v. Wolfe, 106 A.3d 800, 801, 806 (Pa.Super.2014)
. The majority explained that ordinary waiver principles do not apply to “the legality of the sentence,” and that illegal sentences may be corrected by appellate courts of their own accord. Id. at 801 (citing Commonwealth v. Orellana, 86 A.3d 877, 883 n. 7 (Pa.Super.2014) ). Further, the majority observed that the Superior Court had previously determined that violations of Alleyne 's commands implicate sentencing legality. See id. (citing Commonwealth v. Lawrence, 99 A.3d 116, 122–25 (Pa.Super.2014) ).
The majority regarded the Alleyne error in the present case as being patent, in that the mandatory minimum sentence was imposed under the authority of a statute predicating its applicability on a fact designated as a non-element and directing a judge to make the determination by a preponderance of the evidence. In this regard, the majority noted that the Superior Court had previously invalidated a range of similarly-patterned statutes. See id. at 803–05
().
The majority acknowledged the anomaly in Section 9718(c), in that the statute mandates that the age factor “shall not be an element of the crime,” whereas, in point of fact, age is an element. Indeed, the majority recognized that, in Commonwealth v. Matteson, 96 A.3d 1064 (Pa.Super.2014)
, the Superior Court had previously decided that a sentence under Section 9718(a)(1) did not violate Alleyne, on account of this incongruity. See
Wolfe, 106 A.3d at 805–06 (quoting Matteson, 96 A.3d at 1066–67 ). Nevertheless, the majority regarded Matteson as implicitly effectuating a severance of unconstitutional provisions of Section 9718, an exercise which the Superior Court had refused to undertake in other cases, including the en banc Newman decision. See
Newman, 99 A.3d at 102 (); see also
Valentine, 101 A.3d at 811 ().
All members of the three-judge panel took the opportunity to express their views that Newman was wrongly decided and severance should be permitted. See Wolfe, 106 A.3d at 803 n. 4
(Mundy, J.); id. at 807 (Bowes, J., concurring, joined by Jenkins, J.). Furthermore, because the jury, in fact, had determined that the victim in Appellee's case was under the age of sixteen, left to her own devices, Judge Bowes would have deemed any Alleyne -related error to have been harmless. See id. at 808
.
Judge Bowes also expressed concern with the majority's approach in addressing severability sua sponte. See id. at 809
. In her view, the matter was sufficiently debatable, and the underlying questions sufficiently complex, that resolution should have occurred only after full briefing. See id.
Six months after the Superior Court filed its opinion in Wolfe, this Court set forth its own decision in Hopkins, which vindicated the en banc Newman panel's position that unconstitutional terms of a mandatory minimum sentencing statute—including the requirement for operative facts to be determined by a judge at sentencing by a preponderance of the evidence—cannot be severed by the judiciary. See Hopkins, ––– Pa. at ––––, 117 A.3d at 262
. In this regard, this Court found the defective provisions to be simply too fundamental to the sentencing statute to permit severance. See
id. at 259–60 (). In addition, Hopkins emphasized the courts' limited role in redressing statutes infused with such deep-seated constitutional infirmities. See
id. at 262 (...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Commonwealth v. King
...Id. at 21. King also cites this Court's decisions in Commonwealth v. Hopkins , 632 Pa. 36, 117 A.3d 247 (2015) and Commonwealth v. Wolfe , 636 Pa. 37, 140 A.3d 651 (2016), to argue that facts increasing the statutory maximum for an offense must be clearly stated in the charging documents as......
-
Commonwealth v. Veon, 69 MAP 2015
...entire sentencing approach and determine what modifications, if any, are warranted in light of our ruling. See Commonwealth v. Wolfe, ––– Pa. ––––, 140 A.3d 651, 663 n.7 (2016) (holding that "the entire sentencing plan must be reevaluated in instances in which a defendant [successfully] cha......
-
Commonwealth v. Batts
...as confirmed in this Court's recent decisions in Commonwealth v. Hopkins , 632 Pa. 36, 117 A.3d 247 (2015), and Commonwealth v. Wolfe , ––– Pa. ––––, 140 A.3d 651 (2016), it is impermissible for the judiciary to "rewrite" a sentencing statute to make it conform to the constitutional command......
-
Wolf v. Scarnati
...provisions even where "constitutional requirements can be said to have been satisfied in the abstract." Commonwealth v. Wolfe , 636 Pa. 37, 140 A.3d 651, 662 (2016). From my perspective, any effort to re-write the statute or ignore its plain language is merely a means to the same end — i.e.......