Oglesby v. State

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• in light of legislative histories of overlapping firearms statutes, rule of lenity did not limit sentence to that of more lenient offense
• “Our canons of statutory interpretation, however, forbid us to ‘construe a statute ... so that [a] word, clause, sentence, or phrase is rendered surplusage, superfluous, meaningless, or nugatory.’ ”
• “[S]eparation of powers compels that we brook no lightly assumed interference by the judicial branch with the function of [the State’s Attorney.]” (internal quotation marks and citation omitted)
• “It is a tool of last resort, to be rarely deployed and applied only when all other tools of statutory construction fail to resolve an ambiguity.”
• “When a court construes a criminal statute, it may invoke a principle known as the ‘rule of lenity’ when the statute is open to more than one interpretation and the court is otherwise unable to determine which interpretation was intended by the Legislature.” (emphasis added)

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).