State v. Sinchak

Citations

• 205 Conn. App. 346

Syllabus

The defendant, who had been convicted of murder and two counts of kidnap- ping in the first degree, appealed to this court from the judgment of the trial court denying his motion to correct an illegal sentence. The judge who presided over the defendant's probable cause hearing offered the defendant a plea deal at a pretrial conference, proposing a thirty year term of imprisonment if the defendant agreed to plead guilty to murder. The defendant rejected the deal and it was withdrawn. A jury found the defendant guilty of all charges and, at his sentencing hearing, the judge who had presided over the trial imposed a sentence of sixty years of imprisonment on the murder count and eighteen years on each of the kidnapping counts, to run consecutively, for a total effective sentence of ninety-six years of imprisonment. The defendant filed an application with the sentence review division of the Superior Court, requesting a reduction of his sentence, which he claimed was excessive. His request was denied and the sentence was upheld. The defendant then filed a motion to correct an illegal sentence, claiming that, by imposing a sen- tence substantially longer than that which was proposed pretrial, the sentencing judge was punishing the defendant for rejecting the plea deal and, in doing so, violated the defendant's constitutional right to due process. Following a hearing, the trial court denied the defendant's motion and the defendant appealed to this court. Held that the trial court properly denied the defendant's motion to correct an illegal sentence because the record did not contain any indication of vindictiveness on behalf of the sentencing judge: the fact that the length of the sentence imposed greatly exceeded the length of the sentence proposed prior to trial did not give rise to an inference of vindictiveness when the record was considered as a whole, including the defendant's background, his long and violent criminal history, and evidence that the defendant posed su