State v. Rushton: Single Criminal Objective and Mandatory Joinder

A conditional plea to the latest charges and defendant's prior guilty plea to different crimes did not concern conduct with a single criminal objective so as to require a single prosecution under the mandatory joinder statute. State v. Rushton, 2017 UT 21. 

The petitioner-defendant argued that the State violated the mandatory joinder statute by prosecuting him from 2011 to 2012 for wage crimes after earlier prosecuting and convicting him in 2009 and 2010 of tax crimes. Under the mandatory joinder statute, the State cannot prosecute a defendant in separate actions for conduct that “is closely related in time and is incident to an attempt or an accomplishment of a single criminal objective.” The defendant argued that his crimes were a “single criminal episode because it was “closely related in time and ... incident to an attempt or an accomplishment of [the] single criminal objective” of misappropriation of money in his business setting.” However, the Court ruled that this reading of a single criminal episode was too broad and instead considered the totality of the circumstances to determine whether conduct aims at a single criminal objective. The Court listed factors that focused “in particular on the location where the crimes were committed, the nature of the offenses (both the similarity in conduct and, as suggested by the concurrence, the extent to which one offense advances the accomplishment of another), whether the crimes involved different victims, and whether the defendant had the opportunity to deliberately engage in the next-in-time offense.” After weighing these factors, the court concluded that the petitioner-defendant’s criminal conduct did not have a single criminal objective.