In a unanimous opinion, the Court affirmed the circuit court’s judgment holding there was sufficient evidence to find appellant a “persistent offender” pursuant to section 558.016 defined as “one who has been found guilty of two or more felonies committed at different times.” In addition to a Missouri felony conviction from 2009, the Court held there was enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the appellant had been convicted of a felony in Illinois in 2020 thereby satisfying the State’s statutory burden to establish the appellant as a “persistent offender.” The Court specifically stated that it could reasonably be inferred that the Illinois conviction was for a felony based on the text and circumstances of the record surrounding appellant’s Illinois conviction itself and the order of probation listing the offense as “class 4,” which refers to a felony under Illinois law, 730 ILCS 5/5-5-1.
Additionally, the Court found that the appellant failed to preserve two arguments for appeal, one related to the procedure of the persistent offender determination and the other related to the jury instructions, subjecting both arguments to plain error review. For the first argument, the appellant argued that permitting the circuit court, instead of the jury, to find him a persistent offender was a structural error warranting reversal. The Court declined to conduct plain error review on this argument, however, because the appellant could not establish that he suffered manifest injustice by showing that the jury would have made a different decision. Likewise, the Court did not find the failure to include a definition of “serious physical injury” for the first-degree domestic assault charge in the jury instructions to result in manifest injustice and thus refused to exercise plain error review on the appellant’s jury instruction argument.