Sentencing; Amendment of the judgment of sentence (JOS); Principle that a sentence may be considered invalid if the trial court imposed it under a misconception of law; People v. Whalen; People v. Comer; Principle that a court speaks through its written orders & judgments, not through its oral pronouncements; Tomasik v. State; Clerical correction versus a substantive amendment; MCR 6.435(A) & (B); Judicial assignment; MCR 8.111(B) & (C); Schell v. Baker Furniture Co.

While the court concluded that the chief judge’s clarifying amendment was a clerical correction and not a substantive amendment, it vacated the amended JOS because he “did not properly reassign the case to himself” and provide defendant with notice. Defendant pled guilty to CSC III and was sentenced to 5 to 15 years. The chief judge sua sponte entered the amended JOS several years later, after the presiding judge retired. Defendant’s motion to vacate the amended JOS was denied, and the court previously denied his application for appeal, but the Supreme Court remanded for consideration as on leave granted. He first argued that the sentence imposed in the original JOS was invalid and thus, the chief judge’s “amendment impermissibly modified an invalid sentence without complying with the requirements of MCR 6.435(B).” The court disagreed, concluding that any erroneous statements by the presiding judge did “not render the sentence invalid because unlike in Comer, the [JOS] correctly states that defendant was sentenced to serve an indeterminate term of 5 to 15 years’ imprisonment. It is well established that ‘a court speaks through its written orders and judgments, not through its oral pronouncements.’” The presiding judge “had no authority to order that defendant be discharged from prison after his minimum sentence was served—although he could make such a recommendation as he did under” ¶ 12 of the JOS—because his maximum sentence fell within the parole board’s jurisdiction. As the original sentence was valid, the amended JOS amending ¶ 12 “was a clerical correction, rather than a substantive amendment.” But the court vacated the amended JOS because it agreed with defendant that the chief judge “deprived him of due process by presiding over defendant’s case because he did not properly reassign” it to himself and failed to give him notice. The presiding judge’s retirement was good cause that he could not undertake the case, but “until it was reassigned by a written order, it remained assigned to” him, and in general, “only a judge assigned to a case in accordance with the court rules can enter dispositive orders” in it. Thus, the chief judge should not have entered the amended JOS. Remanded “for a proper judicial assignment for the purpose of correcting the” JOS.