Magana v. Colorado
Annotate this CaseDefendant Christopher Magana started a fire that engulfed two cars and a duplex. A jury found defendant guilty of eighteen counts of arson, including two counts of first degree arson, each of which the prosecution had charged as a crime of violence (“COV”) based on Magana’s use of “fire and accelerant” as a deadly weapon. The jury also found that both counts of first degree arson involved the use of a deadly weapon. But at sentencing, the trial court surmised that the jury had reached its sentence-enhancement finding based on fire alone, and refused to sentence Magana under the COV statute. A division of the court of appeals affirmed the convictions, but it concluded that the trial court should have imposed the COV enhancer. On appeal, Magana argued: (1) his eighteen convictions are multiplicitous, and that the controlling unit of prosecution for all forms of arson was the act of starting a fire or causing an explosion—rather than the number of buildings torched, property burned, or people endangered—and, therefore, he should have been convicted on just three counts (one count for each of the categories of harm); and (2) the Colorado General Assembly didn’t intend fire to serve as both a constituent element of first degree arson and a basis for COV sentence enhancement. The Colorado Supreme Court held: (1) the unit of prosecution under the first-, second-, and fourth- degree-arson statutes was, respectively, each building or occupied structure damaged or destroyed, each person’s property (other than a building or occupied structure) damaged or destroyed, and each person endangered; and (2) fire alone was not a deadly weapon for the purpose of prosecuting first degree arson as a COV.
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