Desmond ROHAN, Appellant,
v.
STATE of Florida, Appellee.
District Court of Appeal of Florida, Fourth District.
Richard L. Jorandby, Public Defender, and Richard B. Greene, Assistant Public Defender, West Palm Beach, for appellant.
*902 Robert A. Butterworth, Attorney General, Tallahassee, and Patricia Ann Ash, Assistant Attorney General, West Palm Beach, for appellee.
GROSS, Judge.
Desmond Rohan appeals five convictionstwo counts of burglary with an assault or battery, two counts of battery and one count of false imprisonment. We affirm the burglary convictions, reverse the convictions for battery and false imprisonment, and remand for resentencing.
This case involves two incidents occurring on January 10, 1995. The first episode took place at about 10:15 a.m. in Port St. Lucie. A man rang Melissa Roque's doorbell and asked for "Shelly." The man's speech was impaired and he wore a hearing aid. Roque repeatedly explained to the man that no one named "Shelly" lived at that address. Roque shut and locked the door, but the man continued to knock. She opened the door and again faced the man asking for "Shelly." The man pushed his way in and shoved Roque backwards. She was able to force the man back out the door and he then drove away.
The second incident occurred at about 11:00 a.m. at a community college dormitory in Fort Pierce, about a twenty-minute drive from Roque's apartment. A man knocked on the door of Lisa Bloch's dorm room. Bloch was recovering from knee surgery and was unable to put pressure on her leg. She opened the door and saw a man with a hearing aid who was hard to understand. She thought that the man was asking for her roommate and she said that that woman was not at home. As Bloch started to close the door, the man forced his way into the room and began pushing her. Bloch's injured leg limited her ability to resist. The man took her by the arms and forced her back into the bedroom. He threw Bloch down on the bed, got on top of her, and began squeezing her neck. As she struggled, Bloch's head struck the alarm clock and set off the alarm. Startled, the man got off Bloch, left the bedroom and walked out the front door.
Rohan was arrested and charged with crimes arising from both incidents. For the Roque incident, he was charged with burglary with an assault or battery under section 810.02(2), Florida Statutes (1995)(first degree burglary), and battery under section 784.03, Florida Statutes (1995). For the Bloch episode, he was charged with battery, burglary with an assault or battery, and false imprisonment under section 787.02(1)(a), Florida Statutes (1995). After a jury trial, he was convicted of all charges.
Rohan first contends that the trial court erred in denying his pretrial motion to sever the Bloch charges from those where Roque was the victim. Joinder of offenses in the same information is proper under Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.150(a) if the offenses "are based on the same acts or transactions or on two or more connected acts or transactions." Crimes are "connected" within the meaning of the rule if they "are linked in some significant way." Ellis v. State,
One form of connectedness under the rule is where crimes occur "during a `spree' interrupted by no significant period of respite." Id. at 1000. In addition to geographic and temporal proximity, cases finding a "spree" exhibit a similarity between types of crimes or the manner of their commission, as if the criminal conduct erupted from a common motivational source. For example, in Bundy v. State,
Similarly, Gudinas v. State,
[t]he attempted rape and accompanying violence of [Gudinas'] aborted entry into [the first woman's] car, and the actual rape and extreme violence of his murder of [the second woman] demonstrate a "meaningful relationship" between the two attacks as required by Crossley [v. State,596 So.2d 447 , 450 (Fla.1992) ].
Id.; see also Rolling v. State,
The crimes in this case constitute a spree under Bundy and its progeny. The two incidents were close in time, occurring less than an hour apart. With driving time plugged into the temporal equation, there could have been no significant period of respite between the two burglaries. The aborted attempt at the Roque apartment may have "provided a causal link" to the more aggressive entry at Bloch's dorm room. See Gudinas,
Rohan next argues, and the state concedes, that the convictions for battery cannot stand, in light of Rohan's convictions for burglary with an assault or battery under section 810.02(2). It is improper to convict and sentence a defendant for both first degree burglary and the battery used to enhance the burglary charge. Pope v. State,
Rohan next attacks his false imprisonment conviction, contending that it was subsumed by the conviction for burglary with an assault or battery under the test enunciated in Faison v. State,
In cases where kidnapping or false imprisonment have been charged along with other crimes, courts have applied the Faison test to avoid a literal interpretation of the two statutes that would "convert almost every forcible felony" into an additional crime. Berry v. State,
[I]f a taking or confinement is alleged to have been done to facilitate the commission of another crime, to be kidnapping the resulting movement or confinement:
*904 (a) Must not be slight, inconsequential and merely incidental to other crime;
(b) Must not be of the kind inherent to the other crime; and
(c) Must have some significance independent of the other crime in that it makes the other crime substantially easier of commission or substantially lessens the risk of detection.
Under the Faison test, Rohan's confinement of Bloch does not amount to criminal conduct separate from the burglary with a battery. The confinement was indistinguishable from the battery. See Wilcher v. State,
The first degree burglary convictions are affirmed. The battery and false imprisonment convictions are reversed and the case is remanded to the trial court for resentencing. See Smith v. State,
FARMER and STEVENSON, JJ., concur.
NOTES
Notes
[1] Chaeld holds that a Faison analysis does not apply to a false imprisonment charge, only to kidnapping. To reach this conclusion, the court focuses on the scienter requirement of the kidnapping and false imprisonment statutes. However, the rationale of Faison is that the conduct element of section 787.01(1)(a)"confining, abducting, or imprisoning another person against his will"must be limited to avoid a broad construction that would doubly criminalize the same conduct. Berry,
