Editor’s Note: Law Week Colorado edits court opinion summaries for style and, when necessary, length.
In this criminal case, Chauncey Price appealed his conviction for violating the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act and 14 other convictions related to human trafficking and forgery.
As a matter of first impression, the Colorado Court of Appeals considered and rejected his argument, as applied to him, the patronizing of a prostituted child statute violates his right to equal protection. The Colorado Court of Appeals concluded the patronizing statute criminalizes different conduct than the pimping of a child statute and discerned no equal protection violation in Price’s being convicted of both crimes.
The Colorado Court of Appeals agreed the trial court erroneously instructed the jury on the definition of “enterprise” based on McDonald v. People, which the Colorado Supreme Court decided following the trial. The Colorado Court of Appeals reversed the COCCA conviction. Because the prosecution presented sufficient evidence of an enterprise under the overruled definition, the Colorado Court of Appeals unanimously remanded for a new trial on the COCCA charge and affirmed the remaining convictions.
According to the opinion, Brennan Tanner was the driver in a single-car crash that killed his two passengers. Before the crash, witnesses observed Tanner’s truck speeding and weaving into oncoming traffic. The prosecution charged him with two counts of vehicular homicide – reckless, two counts of criminally negligent homicide and two counts of careless driving.
After a bench trial, the district court acquitted Tanner of the four homicide counts but convicted him of the two counts of careless driving.
Before sentencing, Tanner moved to merge his two careless driving convictions because the unit of prosecution for careless driving is each driving incident, not each victim. The prosecution agreed. But the district court didn’t. Citing subsections (2)(b) and (2)(c) of the careless driving statute, Colorado Revised Statute 42-4-1402, the court concluded the unit of prosecution for careless driving is the harm caused to each victim, and, thus, the merger was not required. The court imposed two one-year jail sentences, to be served consecutively.
Tanner contended the court erred by not merging his two careless driving convictions because the unit of prosecution for that offense is each driving incident, not each person injured or killed as a result thereof, the opinion noted. Reviewing this legal question de novo, citing Magana v. People, the Colorado Court of Appeals agreed.
The Colorado Court of Appeals reversed the judgment and remanded for the district court to merge one of the convictions into the other, vacated the sentence corresponding to the merged conviction and reinstated the judgment as to only one count of careless driving.
Judge Bernard specially concurred.