The Treatment of Foreign Country Convictions as Predicates for Sentence Enhancement Under Recidivist Statutes

Abstract

All jurisdictions within the United States have some form of repeat offender statute that enhances sentences based on prior convictions. Many criminals in the United States have committed crimes in other countries. It is no surprise, then, that a recurring question is whether convictions from foreign countries count as predicate offenses for the purpose of recidivist statutes. Some state legislatures have addressed that question directly, but many more have enacted ambiguous statutes that use phrases such as outside this state. Some courts have interpreted those phrases as embracing convictions from outside the United States, while others have limited their scope to the United States. This note discusses doctrinal and policy considerations and proposes a standard courts should use in deciding when to include foreign country convictions.