State v. McCool

The defendant appeals from his convictions on no contest pleas to ten counts of bribery and two counts of theft in office. He argues that the court (a) should have granted his earlier motion to dismiss the theft in office charges, and (b) imposed an unreasonably harsh sentence. We reject those contentions. However, we recognize as unassigned plain error the court’s failure to merge one bribery conviction into each theft in office conviction in these circumstances.

The defendant does not dispute that he accepted bribes to avoid assignments of criminal cases to selected judges rather than…