California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from People v. Carter, B216587, Los Angeles County Super. Ct. No. PA057750 (Cal. App. 2010):
Thus, merely because appellant had an overall objective of getting money, he still committed separate and independent criminal acts to attain that objective. Virtually any two offenses can be viewed to be within a stated objective, if the objective is stated broadly enough. (See, e.g., People v. Perez (1979) 23 Cal.3d 545, 549, 552 [objective of sexual gratification in a case where defendant was convicted of oral copulation, sodomy, and rape "is much too broad and amorphous to determine the applicability of section 654"].) The fact that the false imprisonment by violence was ongoing did not prevent appellant from forming and carrying out a separate criminal objective. His act of forcing the victims to write down the names of people he could harm if they did not follow his orders constituted criminal threats, and these threats were not incidental to his original crime of false imprisonment by violence, wherein he held the victims to ascertain who took his allegedly stolen money. Moreover, these
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