Appeal
from the Superior Court Nos. 3AN-11-12939 CR &
3AN-12-1443 CR, Third Judicial District, Anchorage, Michael
L. Wolverton, Judge.
Jim
Corrigan, Assistant Public Advocate, Criminal Defense
Section, and Richard Allen, Public Advocate, Anchorage, for
the Appellant.
Ann B.
Black, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Criminal
Appeals, Anchorage, and Craig W. Richards, Attorney General,
Juneau, for the Appellee.
Tracey
Wollenberg, Assistant Public Defender, and Quinlan Steiner,
Public Defender, Anchorage, for the Alaska Public Defender
Agency, appearing as amicus curiae.
Before: Mannheimer, Chief Judge, Allard, Judge, and Hanley,
District Court Judge. [*]
OPINION
MANNHEIMER Judge.
This
case involves a defendant who committed a new crime while he
was on probation in two previous criminal cases. The
defendant ultimately received one sentence in the new
criminal case and separate sentences in the probation
revocation proceedings held in the earlier criminal cases.
The question is whether the defendant may appeal some of
these sentences without appealing all of them.
In our
initial opinion in this case, Jeter v. State,
unpublished, 2015 WL 2453715 (Alaska App. 2015), we declared
that, in these situations, we would not review the
defendant's individual sentences in isolation.
Id. at *3. Rather, we would review the
defendant's total sentence (the direct sentence for the
new crime plus the probation revocation sentences) as one
combined whole - and that, when we resolved the
defendant's sentence appeal, we would assess that
combined sentence in light of the entirety of the
defendant's conduct and criminal history. Ibid.
We
therefore "caution[ed] the defense bar that, in future
cases, we [might] decline to hear sentence appeals if the
defense does not provide us with the record of all
the pertinent court proceedings." Id. at *2
(emphasis in the original).
After
we issued this initial decision, both the Office of Public
Advocacy and the Public Defender Agency asked this Court to
reconsider, or at least further clarify, what we said about
(1) treating a defendant's direct sentence for a new
crime and any related probation revocation sentences as a
combined whole, and about (2) declining to consider a
defendant's appeal of any of these individual sentences
unless the defendant furnished this Court with the pertinent
record in all of the related cases.
We
granted rehearing, we allowed the Public Defender Agency to
enter this case as an amicus curiae, and we
solicited supplemental briefing from the two defense agencies
and from the State. Based on our consideration of that
supplemental briefing, we now issue this decision amending
and clarifying our position on these matters.
We
disavow our earlier suggestion that, when a defendant
receives a sentence for a new crime and also receives one or
more related probation revocation sentences, these sentences
must be evaluated as a unified whole for purposes of sentence
review
This
Court has long recognized that when judges sentence
defendants for two or more crimes in a single sentencing
proceeding, judges "generally do not select particular
individual sentences for the defendant's individual
crimes. Rather, judges select a composite total, and then
they impose individual sentences that add up to that total,
often in a fortuitous way." Richards v. State,
249 P.3d 303, 307 (Alaska App. 2011).[1]
For
this reason, when a defendant is sentenced for two or more
crimes in a single proceeding, this Court does not allow the
defendant to appeal their sentences for individual crimes as
if those sentences had been imposed in isolation. Rather, we
evaluate the defendant's composite sentence - the
combined amount of active and suspended imprisonment ...