Sullivan v. Texas (Original)
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A jury convicted appellant James Sullivan of four sexual assaults against three victims and sentenced him to eighteen years of imprisonment in each case. The trial judge ordered some of the sentences to run concurrently and some to run consecutively. One of the sentences that was stacked was not eligible for stacking. The issue before the Supreme Court in this case concerned the question of the proper remedy when one of a series of sentences is improperly stacked and whether it matters where in the series the improperly stacked sentence appears. The Court reformed the trial court's judgment to reflect that the improperly stacked sentence was not stacked and that the two sentences involving different victims were stacked. The Court also reformed the sequence of stacking to conform to the trial judge's oral pronouncement of sentence.
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