California, United States of America
The following excerpt is from People v. Casillas, B286467 (Cal. App. 2019):
Section 654, subdivision (a), provides: "An act or omission that is punishable in different ways by different provisions of law shall be punished under the provision that provides for the longest potential term of imprisonment, but in no case shall the act or omission be punished under more than one provision." It "precludes multiple punishments for a single act or indivisible course of conduct." (People v. Hester (2000) 22 Cal.4th 290, 294.) The defendant's intent and objective, not the temporal proximity of his or her offenses, determine whether multiple offenses constitute an indivisible course of conduct. (People v. Hicks (1993) 6 Cal.4th 784, 789.) A defendant who acts pursuant to a single objective may be found to have harbored a single intent and therefore may be punished only once. (Ibid.) If, on the other
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