 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to DUI Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
[T] State v. Yi1/20/2004
fendants who own up to their actions only after being convicted. The record contains no hint that the family court actually intended to punish Yi for taking his case to trial.
Yi's second claim, that the family court's punishment of him was based on an uncharged crime (perjury), cannot be disposed of as easily. While the word "perjury" was never used by the family court and there is no indication that the court considered Yi's lying to be a separate offense, it does appear that the family court imposed a harsher sentence on Yi because Yi misled or lied to the court.
In United States v. Grayson, 438 U.S. 41, 50-55, 98 S.Ct. 2610, 2616-18 (1978), the United States Supreme Court held that a defendant's truthfulness while on the stand is a relevant consideration in sentencing:
A defendant's truthfulness or mendacity while testifying on his [or her] own behalf, almost without exception, has been deemed probative of his [or her] attitudes toward society and prospects for rehabilitation and hence relevant to sentencing. Soon after Williams was decided, the Tenth Circuit concluded that "the attitude of a convicted defendant with respect to his [or her] willingness to commit a serious crime [perjury] is a proper matter to consider in determining what sentence shall be imposed within the limitations fixed by statute." Humes v. United States, 186 F.2d 875, 878 (1951). The Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits have since agreed. See n.3, supra. Judge Marvin Frankel's analysis for the Second Circuit is persuasive:
"The effort to appraise 'character' is, to be sure, a parlous one, and not necessarily an enterprise for which judges are notably equipped by prior training. Yet it is in our existing scheme of sentencing one clue to the rational exercise of discretion. If the notion of 'repentance' is out of fashion today, the fact remains that a manipulative defiance of the law is not a cheerful datum for the prognosis a sentencing judge undertakes. Impressions about the individual being sentenced -- the likelihood that he will transgress no more, the hope that he may respond to rehabilitative efforts to assist with a lawful future career, the degree to which he does or does not deem himself at war with his society -- are, for better or worse, central factors to be appraised under our theory of 'individualized' sentencing. The theory has its critics. While it lasts, however, a fact like the defendant's readiness to lie under oath before the judge who will sentence him would seem to be among the more precise and concrete of the available indicia."United States v. Hendrix, 505 F.2d 1233, 1236 (1974).
Only one Circuit has directly rejected the probative value of the defendant's false testimony in his [or her] own defense. In Scott v. United States, 135 U.S. App. D.C. 377, 382, 419 F.2d 264, 269 (1969), the court argued that
"the peculiar pressures placed upon a defendant threatened with jail and the stigma of conviction make his [or her] willingness to deny the crime an unpromising test of his [or her] prospects for rehabilitation if guilty. It is indeed unlikely that many men who commit serious offenses would balk on principle from lying in their own defense. The guilty man [or woman] may quite sincerely repent his [or her] crime but yet, driven by the urge to remain free, may protest his [or her] innocence in a court of law."
See also United States v. Moore, 484 F.2d 1284, 1288 (CA4 1973) (Craven, J., concurring). The Scott rationale rests not only on the realism of the psychological pressures on a defendant in the dock -- which we can grant -- but also on a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Hawaii DUI Attorneys
DUI Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to DUI Lawyers in your area.
|
|