Michigan Court of Appeals orders another new sentence in Lenawee County sex abuse case

ADRIAN — A man convicted in 2018 by a Lenawee County Circuit Court jury of engaging in sex acts with the son and daughter of his on-again, off-again girlfriend and wife should have his minimum sentence reduced again, a Michigan Court of Appeals panel has ordered.

David Alan Stevens’ minimum sentence on a conviction for first-degree criminal sexual conduct should be set between six years and nine months and 11 years and three months, Judges Mark J. Cavanagh, Kathleen Jansen and Allie Greenleaf Maldonado said in their opinion. The change is due to a prior conviction in Ohio being incorrectly used as the basis for a habitual offender enhancement.

“The record does not provide a sufficient basis upon which to conclude that the conduct giving rise to defendant’s Ohio conviction would have been a felony in Michigan, and therefore, the trial court erred by sentencing defendant as a habitual offender,” the opinion states.

This will be the second time Stevens, 48, has been resentenced. The new sentence will be about one-third of the original minimum sentence in this case.

Stevens, 48, is currently serving 14 to 75 years in prison after being resentenced in 2022.

First-degree criminal sexual conduct is punishable by up to life in prison.

Stevens was convicted in 2018 after a trial in Lenawee County Circuit Court of one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and two counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct. Judge Anna Marie Anzalone sentenced him to 21 years and 10 months to 75 years in prison.

The first time he was resentenced, the Court of Appeals found Stevens’ attorney failed to object to faulty jury instructions provided by Anzalone and he failed to request an instruction that would limit how the jury was to consider testimony about other acts that was given during the trial. The Appeals Court vacated the two counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct and ordered he be resentenced because of how the vacated charges had factored into the scoring for the minimum sentence on the first-degree charge as well as an error in calculating the minimum sentence. Anzalone’s new sentence was 14 to 75 years in prison.

In the latest appeal, a different three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals — Judges Mark J. Cavanagh, Kathleen Jansen and Allie Greenleaf Maldonado — agreed with Stevens’ argument that he had been improperly sentenced as a habitual offender. Stevens had prior convictions in Ohio for possession of criminal tools and nonsupport of dependents. For a prior conviction in another state to be used as a habitual offender enhancement, the offense must have been something that would have been a felony or attempt to commit a felony in Michigan, the opinion said.

Anzalone had determined that the criminal tools conviction would not have been a felony in Michigan. The nonsupport charge is a fifth-degree felony in Ohio, but the appeals judges said how another state classifies its offenses doesn’t matter.

“Establishing that defendant was guilty of a fifth-degree felony in Ohio does nothing to establish that this would have been a felony in Michigan,” the opinion states.

In Michigan’s law regarding nonpayment of child support, the opinion says, someone has to violate a court order to make payments in order to be convicted of a felony.

“The critical difference between these offenses is that the Ohio offense does not necessarily require the failure to provide support to be in violation of a court order whereas the Michigan offense does,” the opinion states. “Because the Ohio crime can be committed without there being a support order in place, it is possible for the same conduct to be a crime in Ohio but not in Michigan. Therefore, the knowledge that defendant was found guilty of this crime is not, on its own, sufficient to conclude that the underlying conduct would have been a felony in Michigan. Accordingly, sentencing defendant as a habitual offender with a violation of this Ohio statute serving as the predicate offense requires the court to ascertain some knowledge of the facts underlying the Ohio conviction.”

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There was no information in the sex-abuse case’s record about the underlying facts in Stevens’ nonsupport conviction, the appeals court said.

“There is nothing in the record suggesting that defendant was ordered to pay any such costs, suggesting that the conviction might not have arisen from the violation of an already-existing support order,” the opinion states. “Because we do not know if defendant’s failure to support a dependent conviction was committed in a violation of a court order, it necessarily follows that we do not know if the conduct giving rise to the Ohio conviction would have been a felony in Michigan.”

The prosecution had time to provide evidence that Stevens had violated a court order for support, the opinion said.

“Indeed, the initial resentencing hearing was adjourned specifically to afford the prosecution the opportunity to adequately address whether defendant’s Ohio conviction for possession of criminal tools would be a felony in Michigan,” the opinion says. “The initial hearing was adjourned in July, and the prosecution had until October to gather the information it needed to meet its burden. During that period, it decided to amend the information to list the nonsupport conviction as the predicate for defendant’s habitual offender status but failed to admit any evidence regarding the underlying facts of the nonsupport conviction.”

Giving the prosecution a second chance to meet its burden of proof would be against the principles of fairness and “implicate double jeopardy concerns because the prosecution’s failure to present sufficient evidence of an equivalent prior conviction is analogous to the reversal of a conviction based on insufficient evidence,” the opinion said.

The appellate panel rejected Stevens’ arguments in the latest appeal that his minimum sentencing guidelines range was not properly calculated.

— Contact reporter David Panian at dpanian@lenconnect.com or follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @lenaweepanian.