State v. Badillo

The Criminal Law Revision Commission intended ORS 161.485(2) to prevent multiple convictions for attempt, solicitation, and conspiracy on the basis of a defendant's single course of conduct, as opposed to preventing multiple convictions for multiple instances of one or another of the inchoate crimes.

Badillo appealed her judgment of conviction of attempted first-degree burglary and two counts of solicitation to commit second-degree kidnapping. She argued that the trial court erred in convicting her as an accomplice to attempted first-degree burglary, because no principal actually attempted to commit the crime. Badillo also argued that the trial court failed to merge all of her guilty verdicts for inchoate crimes into a single conviction. Badillo was arrested after she devised a plan to kidnap her neighbors’ child and approached a 17-year-old acquaintance, and subsequently, an undercover trooper, with a job that involved breaking into her neighbors’ home and kidnapping their infant. The Court of Appeals concluded that the trial court did not convict her as an accomplice to attempted first-degree burglary, but rather, it convicted her for attempting that crime itself, and that there was sufficient evidence to support that conviction. The Court also agreed with the State that the person solicited is a material element of solicitation and that the solicitation statute contemplates the commission of the crime by the person solicited. Thus, Badillo’s solicitation of two different people several days apart was designed to culminate in separate commissions of kidnapping and the Court affirmed the trial court’s decision not to merge the two solicitation convictions. Affirmed.