Opinion ID: 1400689
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: appeal of miller

Text: Miller was initially charged with felonious assault and armed robbery. At his first appearance on those charges in District Court on 6 October 1985, he was found indigent and an attorney was appointed to represent him. That appointment was renewed after Miller was charged with first degree murder by a warrant issued on 11 October 1985, after Allen's death. Miller never received nor requested the appointment of additional counsel to assist him in this capital case. On appeal, Miller assigns as error the failure to appoint additional counsel on his behalf in a timely manner. We agree that allowing the capital case against Miller to proceed without the appointment of additional counsel to assist him violated the mandate of N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1). This denial of Miller's statutory right to additional counsel was prejudicial error per se. Therefore, his plea of guilty must be stricken, the verdict and judgment against him vacated and a new trial held. N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1), applicable to indictments returned on or after 11 July 1985, provides in pertinent part: An indigent person indicted for murder may not be tried where the State is seeking the death penalty without an assistant counsel being appointed in a timely manner. The indigent defendant Miller was indicted on 10 March 1986 for first degree murder and brought to trial on 8 July 1986. A jury was impaneled, the defendant entered a guilty plea and a sentencing proceeding resulting in a sentence of death was held, all without the appointment of assistant counsel. Such critical stages of a capital prosecution certainly fall within the statute's mandate that an indigent cannot be tried for his life without timely appointment of assistant counsel. The statute gives a right to assistant counsel which is not to be confused with the fundamental right of criminal defendants to effective assistance of counsel guaranteed by our state and federal constitutions. On its face, the statute provides a right to counsel in addition to constitutional requirements, and reflects a special concern for the adequacy of legal services received by indicted indigents who face the possibility of the death penalty. There is no reason to believe, however, that the statute embodies such a different and limited notion of assistance of counsel that it would not apply to all of the post-indictment critical stages of a criminal prosecution to which the more basic and limited constitutional right to effective assistance applies. Any reasonable notion of timely assistance of counsel must recognize that a criminal defendant's case can be won or lost before trial. The State's interest in a fair, adequate and error-free criminal process also attaches well before the actual trial. The defendant's counsel, whether one or the two which the General Assembly has seen fit to require for indigent defendants in capital cases, must have a reasonable amount of time in which to investigate and prepare a defense. See State v. Cobb, 295 N.C. 1, 243 S.E.2d 759 (1978). N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1) therefore mandates appointment of assistant counsel in a timely manner which ensures under the particular circumstances of a case that both attorneys representing the indigent defendant have time to effectively prepare for trial. In most cases, that mandate would require appointment of assistant counsel as soon as practicable after indictment of the indigent defendant on a capital charge. The trial transcript and record on appeal in this case reveal no discussions of N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1) and are devoid of any request for assistant counsel by the defendant or offer by the trial court to appoint assistant counsel. While possible explanations for those omissions are not at issue, we note that subsection (b1) of the statute was still relatively new when this case arose and that prior to its effective date questions concerning the appointment of additional counsel generally arose upon a motion by the defendant and were within the trial court's discretion. Moreover, subsection (b1) of the statute, as previously discussed, does not expressly indicate when the trial court's duty to appoint assistant counsel arises. The State in this case contends that the absence of any discussion relating to the appointment of assistant counsel amounts to the defendant's waiver of the statutory mandate by failure to assert it at trial. The State, in its brief, equates the mandate of N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1) with statutory rights which have been held waived when not asserted by defendants at trial, including the right to a polling of the jury, N.C.G.S. § 15A-1238, to joinder, N.C.G.S. § 15A-926, and to discovery, N.C.G.S. § 15A-902 and § 15A-903. Those statutes, however, are easily distinguished from N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1), because they expressly require a motion by the defendant before he is entitled to the rights they guarantee. There is no such requirement contained in the language of N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1). Nor is this case controlled by State v. Tindall, 294 N.C. 689, 242 S.E.2d 806 (1978), cited by the State, in which we held that a trial court has no obligation to assist a defendant when he has attempted to use the wrong statutory procedure for compelling the attendance of out-of-state witnesses. Unlike the mandatory appointment of assistant counsel in this case, the procurement of witnesses is clearly an area where the trial court has no reason to act until it is prompted to do so by the litigants. The statutory mandate at issue in this case also does not come under the broadly stated rule found in State v. McDowell, 301 N.C. 279, 271 S.E.2d 286 (1980), cert. denied, 450 U.S. 1025, 101 S.Ct. 1731, 68 L.Ed.2d 220 reh'g denied, 451 U.S. 1012, 101 S.Ct. 2350, 68 L.Ed.2d 865 (1981), where we held that the defendant had waived his right to make an opening statement to the jury by not raising the issue at trial, even though N.C.G.S. § 15A-1221(a)(4) provided that a defendant must be given the opportunity to make such a statement. In that case we stated: It is well established that a defendant may waive the benefit of statutory or constitutional provisions by express consent, failure to assert it in apt time, or by conduct inconsistent with a purpose to insist upon it.... It follows that in order for an appellant to assert a constitutional or statutory right on appeal, the right must have been asserted and the issue raised before the trial court... In addition, it must affirmatively appear on the record that the issue was passed upon by the trial court. 301 N.C. at 291, 271 S.E.2d at 294 (citations omitted). McDowell is distinguishable from the present case. Unlike the mandate contained in the statute before us in this case, the terms of the statute in McDowell required only an opportunity for a defendant to make an opening statement to the jury and, thereby, made an opening statement an option to be chosen or rejected by the defendant. It remained the defendant's responsibility to decide whether to make an opening statement. There was no mandate in that statute that a defendant may not be tried without an opening statement. In contrast, N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1) is clearly mandatory, and its mandate is directed to the trial court. It states simply but unequivocally that an indigent facing a possible death penalty may not be tried unless an assistant counsel has been appointed in a timely manner. The statute requires the trial court to appoint assistant counsel as a matter of course when an indigent is to be prosecuted in a capital case. It neither expressly nor impliedly places any responsibility on the defendant to ask for assistant counsel. When a trial court acts contrary to a statutory mandate, the error ordinarily is not waived by the defendant's failure to object at trial. State v. Ashe, 314 N.C. 28, 331 S.E.2d 652 (1985). We also have recognized that a trial court sometimes has a duty to act sua sponte to avoid statutory violations; for example, the trial court must exclude evidence rendered incompetent by statute, even in the absence of an objection by the defendant. State v. McCall, 289 N.C. 570, 223 S.E.2d 334 (1976). In so holding, we have viewed such mandatory statutes as legislative enactments of public policy which require the trial court to act, even without a request to do so, much like the public policy favoring fair and error-free capital trials which is served by N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1). We have said in McDowell and elsewhere, however, that any right, constitutional or otherwise, can be waived if the waiver is made knowingly and intelligently. A defendant must be allowed under the Sixth Amendment to reject representation by counsel, Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806, 95 S.Ct. 2525, 45 L.Ed.2d 562 (1975), and also to refuse the benefit of assistant counsel provided for by N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1). However, there was no such refusal here. The State would have us infer waiver in the present case from the defendant's silence. Given the mandatory nature of the statute and the public policy it serves, we can find no prerequisite duty of the indigent defendant to request assistant counsel in this capital case and cannot infer waiver of the requirement of assistant counsel from the defendant's silence. The State next contends that even if the mandate of the statute was violated, the error could not have been prejudicial and, therefore, a new trial is not required. We decline to engage in any kind of harmless error analysis under N.C.G.S. § 15A-1443(a) or § 15A-1443(b) in this case. We can only guess what difference a second attorney might have made to this defendant in the preparation of his defense, in his decision as to whether to change his plea to guilty and in the level of representation he received before the trial court. We are especially reluctant to engage in such speculation where, as here, the legislature has chosen to remove that question from the discretion of the courts, changing well-established prior practice. This appeal presents a problem similar to that which this Court faced in a series of cases culminating in the rule last explained in State v. Mitchell, 321 N.C. 650, 365 S.E.2d 554 (1988). In those cases, it was held that a trial court's refusal to allow all of a defendant's attorneys to participate in final arguments to the jury violated N.C.G.S. § 84-14, deprived the defendant of a substantial right, and resulted in potential prejudice which was beyond adequate measurement. We indicated that we could only have speculated as to what effect arguments by additional attorneys might have had, and we declined to do so. We concluded that the reasons against such speculation were common to all cases where the capital defendant had been deprived of his substantial legal right to have all of his counsel address the jury and held that such error constituted prejudicial error per se. 321 N.C. at 659, 365 S.E.2d at 559. In this case, where the defendant was deprived of his substantial legal right to assistant counsel not only during closing arguments but at all stages of the capital prosecution, our speculation would be even more unreliable than that which we refused to undertake in Mitchell. For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the failure to appoint additional counsel for the defendant Miller in a timely manner violated the mandate of N.C.G.S. § 7A-450(b1) and was prejudicial error per se. The trial court erred in accepting Miller's guilty plea and in conducting the sentencing proceeding against him, as the defendant had been denied the level of assistance of counsel required by the statute. Therefore, Miller's guilty plea must be stricken, the judgment sentencing him to death vacated and his case remanded for a new trial.