In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Goodwin Liu, the Supreme Court today concluded that a sentence of 229 years to life was improperly calculated because a five-year prior serious felony enhancement was applied to multiple terms for several offenses when it should have been applied just once. The case is People v. Sasser.
Reversing the First District, Division Five, of the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court said it was necessary “to reconcile four statutory schemes:” the determinate sentencing law, enhanced penalty provisions for forcible sex offenses, the prior serious felony enhancement, and the Three Strikes law. The court repeated the observation it made 16 years ago that “[t]he Three Strikes law’s ‘purpose is not a mantra that the prosecution can invoke in any Three Strikes case to compel the court to construe the statute so as to impose the longest possible sentence.’ ”
