People v. BrownPeople v. Brown
Justices Lampkin and D.B. Walker concurred in the judgment.
ORDER
¶ 1 Held: Affirming defendant‘s conviction for armed habitual criminal where his trial counsel‘s stipulation as to his prior convictions did not constitute ineffective assistance.
¶ 2 Following a bench trial, defendant Alyasa Brown was convicted of being an armed habitual criminal (AHC), i.e., possessing a firearm after having been convicted of two prior qualifying offenses (
BACKGROUND
¶ 3 BACKGROUND
¶ 4 Defendant was arrested in 2008 and charged with armed robbery while armed with a firearm (
¶ 5 Defendant was in the passenger seat of a vehicle which was pulled over by an Illinois State Trooper in the early morning hours of July 3, 2019, after the trooper noticed that the driver was not wearing a seatbelt. Defendant owned the vehicle; the trooper confirmed that defendant had a valid driver‘s license and insurance. Upon detecting the odor of marijuana and observing cannabis residue on defendant‘s lap, the trooper directed him to exit from the vehicle and performed a pat-down, which did not reveal any contraband on defendant‘s person. When questioned by the trooper, defendant indicated that there was a marijuana “blunt” in the vehicle. The trooper then examined the vehicle and recovered a loaded firearm from under the passenger seat. Defendant did not have a Firearm Owner‘s Identification card or a concealed carry license.
¶ 6 Defendant was indicted in a five-count complaint for AHC (
¶ 7 The trooper who effectuated the traffic stop testified, in part, regarding his recovery of the handgun; a certified abstract of the vehicle registration was also submitted to the trial court. The parties stipulated that defendant “has two qualifying felony convictions.”2 After the State rested, the trial court denied defendant‘s motion for a directed finding. Defendant did not testify or otherwise present evidence. The trial court found defendant guilty of AHC.
¶ 8 Defendant moved to vacate the judgment and for a new trial, arguing that his proximity to the firearm was insufficient to establish constructive possession for purposes of the AHC statute. The trial court denied the motion and sentenced defendant to 9 years in prison and 18 months of mandatory supervised release. His motion to reconsider sentence was also denied, and defendant timely filed this direct appeal.
ANALYSIS
¶ 9 ANALYSIS
¶ 10 On appeal, defendant initially challenged the sufficiency of the evidence, i.e., he argued that the State failed to prove him guilty of AHC as the prior offenses on which it relied were not qualifying offenses. Defendant‘s argument is premised on changes to the Juvenile Court Act.
¶ 11 Juvenile Court Act
¶ 12 Article 5 of the Juvenile Court Act addresses delinquent minors. Section 5-120 states that “no minor who was under 18 years of age at the time of the alleged offense may be prosecuted under the criminal laws of this State,” except as provided in specified provisions of
¶ 13 Parties’ Arguments on Appeal
¶ 14 Given that the 2016 amendment removed armed robbery from the list of offenses which served as bases for adult criminal prosecution, defendant maintained that his convictions for armed robberies committed in 2008 when he was 16 years old would not be considered “convictions” and could not serve as predicate offenses for his AHC offense in 2019. He acknowledged that his trial counsel had stipulated that his armed robbery convictions were qualifying convictions under the AHC statute. Defendant argued, however, that even if his challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence was forfeited, his counsel was ineffective for entering the stipulation and for failing to contest the use of the prior offenses.
¶ 16 On March 21, 2024, our supreme court issued an opinion in Gray, which was subsequently modified upon denial of rehearing. People v. Gray, 2024 IL 127815. The defendant in Gray had argued that the State failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had the necessary predicate convictions for an AHC conviction as he was 17 years old at the time of one of the predicate offenses alleged in the indictment. Id. ¶ 14. The appellate court reversed the defendant‘s AHC conviction, concluding that his earlier conviction would now be deemed a delinquency adjudication in juvenile court, based on an amendment to the Juvenile Court Act. Id. In reversing the judgment of the appellate court and remanding for further proceedings, the Illinois Supreme Court concluded that defense counsel‘s stipulation to the prior qualifying offenses was “determinative of the matter,” i.e., the stipulation provided sufficient evidence to convict the defendant of being an AHC. Id. ¶¶ 26, 27, 34. Although the defendant could not directly attack the sufficiency of the evidence, our supreme court found that he could argue that his counsel‘s agreement to the stipulation constituted ineffective assistance of counsel. Id. ¶ 29. Our supreme court concluded, however, that the defendant could not prevail on a claim of ineffective assistance, as he conceded in his appellate brief that he had another adult felony conviction which could serve as a qualifying offense under the AHC statute. Id. ¶ 32.
¶ 18 Ineffective Assistance of Counsel
¶ 19 An ineffective assistance of counsel claim is subject to the standard set forth in Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984). People v. Hatter, 2021 IL 125981, ¶ 25. “Under Strickland, a defendant must establish that counsel‘s performance fell below an objective standard of reasonableness and the defendant was prejudiced by counsel‘s substandard performance.” People v. Agee, 2023 IL 128413, ¶ 50. See People v. Bew, 228 Ill. 2d 122, 127-28 (2008) (stating that “[a] defendant, to establish deficiency, must prove that counsel‘s performance, as judged by an objective standard of competence under prevailing professional norms, was so deficient that counsel was not functioning as the ‘counsel’ guaranteed by the sixth amendment”).
¶ 20 Defendant asserts that his attorney was ineffective for stipulating to an element of AHC, i.e., his qualifying offenses. The State maintains that defense counsel did not perform deficiently and defendant was not prejudiced, since the admission of his armed robbery convictions as
¶ 21 Statutory Interpretation Principles
¶ 22 Our analysis requires that we interpret the AHC statute. “The fundamental rule of statutory interpretation is to ascertain and give effect to the legislature‘s intent, and the best indicator of that intent is the statutory language, given its plain and ordinary meaning.” People v. Hartfield, 2022 IL 126729, ¶ 68. The statute must be considered as a whole; we must construe words and phrases “relative to other pertinent statutory provisions,” not in isolation. Id. “Unless the language of a statute is ambiguous, a court should not resort to further aids of construction and must apply the statute as written.” People v. Clark, 2019 IL 122891, ¶ 26. The construction of a statute is a question of law subject to de novo review (id. ¶ 17), meaning that we perform the same analysis that a trial court would perform. Mitchell v. Michael‘s Sports Lounge, 2023 IL App (1st) 220011, ¶ 26.
¶ 23 The AHC Statute
¶ 24 The AHC statute provides, in pertinent part, that a person commits the offense of being an armed habitual criminal if he possesses any firearm “after having been convicted a total of 2 or more times of any combination of the following offenses.”
¶ 25 In this case, defendant was found to have possessed a firearm after having been convicted twice of armed robbery.
¶ 26 Nothing in the plain language of the AHC statute, however, indicates defendant‘s prior convictions should be recharacterized as juvenile delinquency adjudications. E.g., People v. Wallace, 2023 IL App (1st) 200917, ¶ 33 (noting that the “having been convicted” language in the AHC statute is the grammatical equivalent of “if he/she was convicted” (emphasis in original)). See also Fitzsimmons v. Norgle, 104 Ill. 2d 369, 372-73 (1984) (holding that the defendant‘s conviction as a juvenile in adult court served as a conviction). We are not free to read into a statute “exceptions, limitations, or conditions the legislature did not express.” Dew-Becker v. Wu, 2020 IL 124472, ¶ 14.
¶ 27 We further observe that the Illinois Appellate Court has repeatedly rejected defendant‘s reasoning. E.g., Wallace, 2023 IL App (1st) 200917, ¶ 35 (finding that the plain language of the AHC statute references past convictions for predicate offenses; concluding “that defendant was ‘convicted’ of armed robbery in 2008 (which remained a forcible felony in 2019), and this was sufficient to serve as a predicate offense to being an armed habitual criminal”); People v. Irrelevant, 2021 IL App (4th) 200626, ¶ 36 (stating that “all that matters is that defendant had a conviction, and that conviction was for an offense described in subsection (a)(1) at the time defendant committed the underlying conduct which resulted in the armed habitual criminal
¶ 28 Defendant contends that we should apply the reasoning of People v. Dawson, 2022 IL App (1st) 190422, ¶ 48, wherein the appellate court found that the State had not proven that the defendant “had two qualifying adult convictions under the law in effect at the time of his armed habitual criminal offense.” We decline to do so, as our supreme court recently entered a supervisory order which directed the appellate court to vacate its judgment and to consider the effect of Gray “on the issue of whether the State proved beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant had the requisite predicate adult convictions necessary to sustain his armed habitual criminal conviction and determine if a different result is warranted.” People v. Dawson, No. 129136 (Ill. May 29, 2024) (supervisory order).
¶ 29 In any event, we disagree with the Dawson court‘s suggestion that the “as defined” language in section (a)(1) of the AHC statute (“a forcible felony as defined in Section 2-8 of the Code”) means that the predicate offenses would have to be currently punishable in adult criminal court. See Dawson, 2022 IL App (1st) 190422, ¶¶ 47-48. We instead view the proper analysis as whether the predicate offense is a forcible felony as defined in section 2-8. E.g., Hawkins, 2024 IL App (1st) 220991-U, ¶ 21 (stating that “[t]he present tense aspect of subsection (a)(1) is concerned only with whether the offense of conviction remains defined as a forcible felony under
¶ 30 We therefore find that defendant‘s convictions for armed robberies committed in 2008 remain adult criminal convictions, not juvenile adjudications. See id. ¶ 20 (rejecting defendant‘s “attempts to avoid this reality by having us consider a hypothetical and counterfactual robbery, as though it were committed in 2020 instead of 2013”). Even without defense counsel‘s stipulation, the trial court would have correctly allowed the admission of defendant‘s two prior armed robbery convictions as predicate convictions for his current offense of AHC. As the admission of defendant‘s prior convictions as predicate convictions for AHC was proper, we conclude that defense counsel‘s performance was not deficient, and defendant was not prejudiced. See Agee, 2023 IL 128413, ¶ 50 (discussing the performance and prejudice prongs of Strickland). See also People v. Pingelton, 2022 IL 127680, ¶ 60 (noting that a “defendant‘s trial attorney cannot be considered ineffective for failing to raise or pursue what would have been a meritless motion or objection”). For the foregoing reasons, defendant‘s claim of ineffective assistance must fail.
CONCLUSION
¶ 31 CONCLUSION
¶ 32 The judgment of the circuit court of Cook County is affirmed in its entirety.
¶ 33 Affirmed.