Saturday, May 04, 2019

Murdock revisited

Patrick H. Dunn and Samuel Schirer won in State v. Murdock, No. 117,315 (April 19, 2019), reversing the "correction" Mr. Murdock's sentence in a Shawnee County prosecution. As blogged about here, Mr. Murdock won in a previous appeal establishing that his pre-guidelines offenses should be classified as nonperson felonies. Pursuant to this decision, the district court resentenced Mr. Murdock using criminal history category C instead of criminal history category A. Then, less than a year after the KSC's final order in Murdock I, the KSC reversed it in State v. Keel, No. 106,096 (Kan. 2015). The state then filed a motion to correct illegal sentence in Mr. Murdock's case, arguing that the sentence imposed was now illegal under Keel. The district court agreed and resentenced Mr. Murdock using criminal history category A.

The KSC reversed and remanded to reinstate the sentence imposed after the first appeal. It did so by clarifying what it means for a sentence to be illegal under K.S.A. 22-3504:

Indeed, our longstanding definition of an "illegal sentence" suggests a sentence that was legal at the time it was imposed cannot later become illegal when the law changes. For example, and most relevant here, we have often held an illegal sentence includes one "that does not conform to the statutory provisions, either in character or the term of the punishment authorized." According to the State, an illegal sentence would also include one that does not conform to a future, unwritten, unknown statute at sentencing (and at resentencing, and at the next resentencing, and so on, as long as applicable statutes are amended). This view stretches the definition of an illegal sentence beyond its reasonable bounds and provides no logical endpoint. On the contrary, our existing definition implicitly recognizes that a district court judge must sentence a defendant according to the law in effect at the time.

Today, we clearly state what we gestured toward in Lee: the legality of a sentence under K.S.A. 22-3504 is controlled by the law in effect at the time the sentence was pronounced. The legality of a sentence is fixed at a discrete moment in time—the moment the sentence was pronounced. At that moment, a pronounced sentence is either legal or illegal according to then-existing law. Therefore, for purposes of a motion to correct an illegal sentence, neither party can avail itself of subsequent changes in the law. 

Here, we pause to note that today's holding does not disturb our longstanding rule that in a direct appeal, a defendant will receive the benefit of any change in the law that occurs while the direct appeal is pending. To the extent our prior caselaw confused the procedural mechanism of a direct appeal with a motion to correct an illegal sentence, we now clarify the distinction. Put simply, a party may seek and obtain the benefit of a change in the law during the pendency of a direct appeal, but a party moving to correct an illegal sentence is stuck with the law in effect at the time the sentence was pronounced. 

 Because the KSC held that the sentence imposed after its first decision was clearly legal at the time, it held that the district court erred by imposed a "corrected" sentence after the law changed in Keel.

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