In re Pers. Restraint of Canha

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A jury found Steven Canha guilty of two counts of assault in the second degree and two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm in the first degree. At the sentencing hearing, the superior court calculated Canha's offender score by using four out-of-state criminal convictions, one from California and three from Oregon. However, the court failed to perform a comparability analysis of these out-of-state convictions to see whether they were sufficiently comparable to any Washington offenses. The superior court sentenced Canha to serve 154 months. At issue before the Washington Supreme Court was whether the four criminal convictions from other states were sufficiently comparable to Washington crimes that they should have been included in a defendant's criminal history for sentencing purposes. The Supreme Court conducted the comparability analysis, concluded that three of Canha's four foreign convictions were comparable to Washington offenses, and remanded the case to the superior court to resentence Canha accordingly. View "In re Pers. Restraint of Canha" on Justia Law