Opinion ID: 202475
Heading Depth: 6
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Guilty Pleas and Judicial Estoppel

Text: As for the question of law, the defendants argue for a rule that admissions to facts at an earlier guilty plea colloquy by a criminal defendant should generally bind that person as a plaintiff in subsequent civil rights actions. We reject any such per se rule. There is reason for caution. The seminal case, relied on by defendants for the proposition that judicial estoppel should, as a rule, apply to facts admitted during guilty pleas, is Lowery v. Stovall, 92 F.3d 219 (4th Cir. 1996). See, e.g., Johnson v. Linden City Corp., 405 F.3d 1065, 1069-70 (10th Cir. 2005) (relying on Lowery). In Lowery, a civil plaintiff who had pled guilty to maliciously causing bodily injury to a police officer with intent to kill sued the police for excessive use of force. 92 F.3d at 221. In oftquoted language, the Lowery court said: Particularly galling is the situation where a criminal convicted on his own guilty plea seeks as a plaintiff in a subsequent civil action to claim redress based on a repudiation of the confession. The effrontery or, as some might say it, chutzpah, is too much to take. There certainly should be an estoppel in such a case. -20- 92 F.3d at 225 (quoting Hazard, Revisiting the Second Restatement of Judgments: Issue Preclusion and Related Problems, 66 Cornell L. Rev. 564, 578 (1981)). This language could be taken to mean that any defendant who pleads guilty and in doing so admits to certain facts is thus playing fast and loose if he takes an inconsistent position later, and so he should be judicially estopped. That is not our view. If chutzpah alone justified judicial estoppel, a great many claims would be estopped. Courts, whether on appeal, motion for new trial, or petition for post-conviction or collateral relief, commonly address contentions that a defendant should not be bound by facts stated in a plea agreement. That being so, the mere assertion of inconsistent facts from those admitted in a plea does not strike us as inherently impugning the integrity of the judicial process. Judicial estoppel, for example, is not applicable to bar a criminal defendant from later asserting a claim based on innocence either on direct appeal or on habeas corpus, even when such a claim rests on facts that contradict the criminal defendant's in-court and sworn representations. See Morris v. California, 966 F.2d 448, 453-54 (9th Cir. 1991), cert. denied, 506 U.S. 831 (1992). At least two other concerns arise in this setting with respect to whether there is any impugning of judicial integrity. The first is that guilty pleas do not necessarily establish -21- absolute historic facts; what is stated in a plea arrangement is an agreed-upon version of the facts that, while it avoids misrepresentation, is sufficient to support the entry of the plea. It is not uncommon for the statement of those facts to be shaped by bargaining between the parties. For example, in United States v. Yeje-Cabrera, 430 F.3d 1 (1st Cir. 2005), this court discussed extensively the issue of fact bargaining in guilty pleas; we described fact bargaining as an inevitable consequence of the process of plea bargaining. Id. at 27-28. Plea bargains benefit both the prosecution and the defense: the defendant is motivated to bargain to get lenient treatment, and the prosecution gains from bargains by saving resources and achieving efficient outcomes. Indeed, it may be the later civil rights plaintiff who seeks to apply judicial estoppel against the prosecution for statements agreed to in plea agreements. Cf. United States v. Levasseur, 846 F.2d 786, 790-95 (1st Cir. 1986) (reversing district court's application of judicial estoppel to bar government from alleging certain crimes as RICO violations); cf. also United States v. Christian, 342 F.3d 744, 748 (7th Cir. 2003) (rejecting judicial estoppel of government); Young v. Dept. of Justice, 882 F.2d 633, 639-40 (2d Cir. 1989) (considering whether judicial estoppel should apply against the government, albeit in a non-plea-agreement scenario). -22- Secondly, the question of judicial acceptance of a guilty plea may turn on the particulars of a given case. All facts recited during the plea colloquy are not necessarily accepted by a judge. Mass. R. Crim. P. 12(c)(5)(A), for example, precludes a judge from accepting a plea of guilty unless [he] is satisfied that there is a factual basis for the charge. Significantly, the rule also provides that [t]he failure of the defendant to acknowledge all of the elements of the factual basis shall not preclude a judge from accepting a guilty plea. The federal rule generally is that the facts recited may prove more than what is charged, but not less. Christian, 342 F.3d at 748 (citing United States v. Martin, 287 F.3d 609, 621 (7th Cir. 2002)). Here, for example, Thore argues that the plea colloquy did not need to recite that officer Dibara was in fear for his life when he shot, in order to establish that Thore was guilty of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, by automobile. Indeed, viewing the state crime as a general intent crime, all that was needed was that the officers were touched by his car and the touching was not accidental, not that Thore intended to injure the officers. The Supreme Court has, in New Hampshire, tied the judicial-acceptance factor to the risk of inconsistent decisions from two courts. 532 U.S. at 750-51. In this context -- guilty pleas followed by § 1983 actions -- the Heck doctrine will cause -23- dismissal of any § 1983 case which could undermine the conviction.4 But to say his claim may survive Heck is not to say that judicial estoppel can play no role as to facts admitted at a plea colloquy. Judicial estoppel is, after all, a doctrine of equity. Another rationale -- avoidance of misleading the court -- has been articulated for judicial estoppel. In our view, it is wrong to think that either the defendant or the government has necessarily misled or made an intentional misrepresentation5 to the court that accepted the plea when a party tries to assert a partially inconsistent version of the facts in a later civil rights action.6 And it would be equally wrong to use the judicial estoppel doctrine automatically to foreclose genuine efforts to demonstrate the truth. 4 But see Johnson, 405 F.3d at 1069-70 (analyzing issue of inconsistency between state conviction and federal civil rights case under judicial estoppel, not Heck). 5 Of course, no relief from judicial estoppel usually is available to a party who has undermined the integrity of the judicial system by intentionally misrepresenting historic facts. Thore argues the converse: that the standard should be that he should not be held to his earlier statement until it is shown that he intentionally misled the earlier court, and there is no intentional misrepresentation at issue here. But, under Alternative System Concepts, a party is not automatically excused from judicial estoppel if the earlier statement was made in good faith. 374 F.3d at 35. 6 As to legal theories, the Federal Rules themselves permit pleading of inconsistent theories in a single action. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(e)(2). -24- Circuit courts have been sensitive to this problem. In Carrasca v. Pomeroy, 313 F.3d 828 (3rd Cir. 2002), the plaintiffs, who were of Hispanic descent, brought a racial profiling action against park officials alleging that the officials had applied swimming regulations differentially between Hispanic and nonHispanic visitors. Id. at 830, 832. Plaintiffs had all been arrested for use of the lake and had pled guilty to state charges (though they later contended that at least one of the plaintiffs had not actually broken the regulations). Id. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the park officials, id. at 830, and the court of appeals reversed and remanded for reconsideration of the application of judicial estoppel, id. at 835. In doing so, it relied on statements in Haring v. Prosise, 462 U.S. 306, 318-19 (1983), that there are a number of reasons why a defendant might choose to plead guilty. Carrasca, 313 F.3d at 835; see also Haring, 462 U.S. at 318-19 (noting that a defendant's decision to plead guilty may have any number of other motivations, including shock, avoidance of financial and emotional cost, and hope for a lesser sentence). Accordingly, we reject the notion that judicial estoppel automatically applies to facts admitted during guilty pleas.