Set Aside Enhanced Sentences in New York

In People v. Acevedo, 17 N.Y.3d 297, 952 N.E.2d 1047, 929 N.Y.S.2d 55 (2011), the Court of Appeals determined that the defendants, who had received enhanced sentences based on prior convictions, were not entitled to have their enhanced sentences set aside where they moved for resentencing on their predicate crimes to correct the original sentences, which were erroneously missing statutorily mandated periods of PRS, and were resentenced to fix the omission of PRS after the convictions in question. The Court concluded that "the decisive feature of these cases was that the sentencing errors the defendants sought to correct by resentencing were errors in their favor: PRS was illegally omitted from their original sentences. The only practical benefit defendants could possibly gain from the resentencings was to move their sentences to a later date, thus eliminating their prior crimes as predicates in their later cases." Acevedo, 17 N.Y.3d at 302. In rejecting that tactic, the Court found that, under those circumstances, "the original sentencing date should be the one to be considered for predicate felony purposes." Id.