Court Approves Career Offender Sentence That is Eight Times Presumptive Sentence

Vickla v. State, Minn.S.Ct., 1/26/2011.  Mr. Vickla pled guilty to offering forged checks in an amount greater that $35,000.00.  He admitted that he qualified as a career offender under Minn.Stat. 609.1095, subd. 4, and agreed that the trial court could sentence him.  The trial court maxed him out at 240 months.  After a while, Mr. Vickla filed a post conviction petition to complain about the sentence.  He got no relief but the court of appeals sent the case back for resentencing, saying that the trial court abused its discretion.  The supreme court reversed the court of appeals.

The presumptive guidelines sentence was 33 months, so the sentence imposed was just shy of eight times the presumptive sentence.  Mr. Vickla has eleven prior felony convictions but nine of them had decayed.  The supreme court seemingly declines the state’s suggestion that trial courts have unfettered discretion to sentence under 609.1095.  Instead, the court looks to 244.11, subd. 2(b), which says that an appellate court may review a sentence to determine whether it is inconsistent with statutory requirements, unreasonable, inappropriate, excessive, unjustifiably disparate, or not warranted by the findings of fact issued by the district court.”  It concludes that the sentence is not contrary to this statute.

An appellate court may consider comparable sentences in other departure cases to determine if the sentence under review is unjustifiably disparate, but to be “comparable” the sentence compared must be based upon the same or similar reasons.  Two of the three cases that the court of appeals looked at in reversing Mr. Vickla’s sentence did not involve career offenders and were thus not “comparable”.  The third case was a career offender case, with the sentence at the maximum sentence; that was good enough for the supreme court.  To seal the deal the court dropped in a footnote to list previous cases which had upheld a statutory maximum sentence for a career offender.  What the court is telling trial courts, without saying it is that if the statutory requirements under 609.j1095, subd. 4, the trial court does, indeed, have unfettered discretion to max out the defendant.