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687 So. 2d 29

Docket No. 96-943.

Harris v. State

Paul HARRIS, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee.

District Court of Appeal of Florida

Decided January 3, 1997.

District Court of Appeal of Florida · decided 1997-01-03

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“In Mincey , “appellant relied on standby counsel extensively, before, during and after the trial,” and standby counsel handled the sentencing. Id. at 238 . But see Harris v. State, 687 So.2d 29, 30 (Fla. 5th DCA 1997) (“While we agree that the court should have renewed the offer of assistance of counsel prior to sentencing, we find such error to be harmless in this case. Harris was sentenced within the guideline range and, based on this record, we do not believe that he would have gotten a lesser sentence had the court appointed ten lawyers to speak for him”).”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Birlkey v. State

Relies on 491 So. 2d 1129 - State v. DiGuilio

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1997-01-03

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently August 2017

5 state decisions

30199720002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

¶1James B. Gibson, Public Defender, and M.A. Lucas, Assistant Public Defender, Daytona Beach, for Appellant.

¶2Robert A. Butterworth, Attorney General, Tallahassee, and David H. Foxman, Assistant Attorney General, Daytona Beach, for Appellee.

¶3HARRIS, Judge.

¶4Paul Harris was convicted of several counts of aggravated stalking, burglary of a structure, criminal mischief, and grand theft. He was sentenced within the guideline range. Harris, who received consent to represent himself, now seeks reversal because the court did not renew the offer of assistance of counsel "at each subsequent stage of the proceedings." See Rule 3.111(d)(5), Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure.

¶5The court properly conducted a Faretta hearing and concluded that Harris was competent to represent himself at trial. Although there was a mistrial because of a statement by one of the witnesses, we conclude that the retrial conducted shortly thereafter was not a "subsequent stage of the proceedings" within the contemplation of the rule. Harris had just been given the opportunity *30 to represent himself at trial and the retrial was the repetition of the previous stage rather than a subsequent one. He gave no indication that he desired to change his mind about self-representation.

¶6While we agree that the court should have renewed the offer of assistance of counsel prior to sentencing, we find such error to be harmless in this case. Harris was sentenced within the guideline range and, based on this record, we do not believe that he would have gotten a lesser sentence had the court appointed ten lawyers to speak for him. State v. DiGuilio,491 So.2d 1129 (Fla. 1986).

¶7AFFIRMED.

¶8COBB and THOMPSON, JJ., concur.

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