Nazario v. Georgia
Annotate this CaseAppellant William Nazario pled guilty to 17 of 26-counts of an indictment charging him with numerous crimes related to the beating and stabbing death of his girlfriend and the mistreatment of her three daughters. Despite Appellant's argument at the plea hearing that several of his 17 convictions merged, the trial court sentenced him for all 17 crimes. On direct appeal to the Supreme Court, Appellant again raised the claim that several of his convictions merged. The State argued that because Appellant pled to those crimes, he waived the right to claim merger. Upon review, the Supreme Court found that a line of precedential appellate cases that held that a guilty plea waives merger claims. But the Court concluded that those cases were wrongly decided. A conviction that merges with another conviction is void, and a sentence imposed on such a void conviction is illegal and will be vacated if the Supreme Court noticed it, even if no merger claim was raised in the trial court and the defendant does not raised it on appeal. Both the indictment and the factual basis for the guilty plea show that Appellant's five separate convictions for concealing the death of his girlfriend merged into a single conviction and should have resulted in only one sentence for that crime rather than the five separate sentences that the trial court imposed. Accordingly, the Court vacated four of Appellant's five concealment convictions and sentences.
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