In the recently decided case of Eric T. Washington v. State, No. 0063 Sept. Term, 2008 (Md.Ct.Sp.App. 2010), a Maryland court ruled that Mr. Washington could not be punished as a repeat offender for the second of two offenses that occurred simultaneously and resulted from the same act.
Mr. Washington was pulled over in the early morning hours of March 4,2007 after speeding, making an improper turn and weaving over the center line. The officer who stopped Mr. Washington noticed a strong smell of alcohol on his breath and that his responses to questions were very slurred. Mr. Washington said he could not perform the "walk and turn" or "One leg stand" field sobriety tests because of physical impairment, so the officer tried to get Mr. Washington to follow a finger with his eyes. Mr. Washington failed to do this, and was arrested. A chemical alcohol test if his breath returned a BAC of 0.25, or about 3 times the legal limit. He was charged with both driving under the influence and driving with a BAC over the legal limit and when he was convicted of both, the trial court treated the latter charge as a "repeat offense." This meant that the sentences for the crimes would run consecutively and not concurrently, effectively doubling the amount of time Mr. Washington would spend in prison.
On appeal, Mr. Washington argued that because both of his convictions stemmed from the single act of driving drunk, it was unfair to punish the DUI per se conviction as a repeat offense. The court agreed, reasoning that under the "rule of lenity," courts should not punish the same conduct twice unless that is clearly what the legislature intended. The rule of lenity is a legal convention used by judges to interpret laws and typically only applies to statutes enacted by the legislature. It is defined in Maryland thusly:
The policy behind the rule is that the Court will not interpret a...criminal statute so as to increase the penalty that it places on an individual when such an interpretation can be based on no more than a guess as to what [the legislature] intended.
Monoker v. State, 321 Md. 214, 222-23 (1990).
Because there was no evidence that Maryland's General Assembly intended to punish offenders twice for the same act, the court decided that the rule of lenity applied here. The court also relied on the reasoning of Jones v. State, 357 Md. 141 (1999), in which one conviction for driving on a suspended license and another for driving on a revoked license were punished as a single act. Applying the rule of lenity to Mr. Washington's case, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruled that the lesser of his sentences (the DUI per se in his case) would be merged into the greater. As a result, Mr. Washington will serve about two and a half years in prison instead of over five.
