France v. Commonwealth

Opinion of the Court by

Justice VENTERS.

Appellant, Ricky France, appeals as a matter of right 1 from a judgment entered upon a jury verdict by the Warren Circuit Court convicting him of failure to register as a sex offender and of being a first-degree persistent felony offender (PFO). France received an underlying sentence of three years on the failure to register charge, enhanced to twenty years upon the PFO conviction.

In his appeal, France raises three arguments: (1) that the first-degree PFO conviction was impermissibly based, in part, upon the same 1997 rape conviction (for a 1995 rape)…