Opinion ID: 1434591
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Logical Inference from the Guilty Plea

Text: Without any sufficiently reliable records from the state proceedings, the linchpin of the government's argument is its interpretation of the logical consequences of Rosa's guilty plea to First Degree Robbery. The government contends that the defendant's guilty plea to Robbery in the First Degree rather than to Robbery in the Second Degree in the 1991 proceedings necessarily means that he admitted that the crime involved a firearm. Gov't Br. at 24-27, 29. The government's logic is as follows: The elements of subsection (4) of Robbery in the First Degree are identical to the elements of Robbery in the Second Degree under subsection (2)(b). Compare N.Y. Penal Law § 160.15(4) (First Degree) (A person is guilty of robbery in the first degree when he forcibly steals property and when, in the course of the commission of the crime or of immediate flight therefrom, he or another participant in the crime. . . . [d]isplays what appears to be a pistol, revolver, rifle, shotgun, machine gun or other firearm. . . .) with id. § 160.10(2)(b) (Second Degree) (A person is guilty of robbery in the second degree when he forcibly steals property and when . . . [i]n the course of the commission of the crime or of immediate flight therefrom, he or another participant in the crime . . . [d]isplays what appears to be a pistol, revolver, rifle, shotgun, machine gun or other firearm. . . .). Insofar as Rosa's case was concerned, the only difference between the two, which defines their relationship to one another, is that a person accused of Robbery in the First Degree can assert, as an affirmative defense, that such pistol, revolver, rifle, shotgun, machine gun or other firearm was not a loaded weapon from which a shot, readily capable of producing death or other serious physical injury, could be discharged. Id. § 160.15(4). If the defendant can establish that affirmative defense, the alleged crime is reduced to Robbery in the Second Degree. The government asserts that here, by pleading guilty to first degree robbery, Rosa waived this affirmative defense. And by doing so, Rosa necessarily conceded that the weapon was a firearm. We find the government's argument unpersuasive. Rosa pleaded guilty, as reflected by the plea colloquy, to a crime that included only the display [of] what appeared to be . . . a handgun. 1991 Plea Tr. at 16. When charging a defendant with robbery in the first degree (displayed) in New York, the state's burden is not to introduce into evidence the weapon used in the robbery; nor [need it] present evidence that the weapon was loaded or capable of being fired. People v. Padua, 297 A.D.2d 536, 539, 747 N.Y.S.2d 205, 208 (1st Dep't 2002). Instead, `Penal Law § 160.15(4) merely requires the prosecution to prove that the defendant or another participant displayed what appeared to a be pistol, revolver or other firearm.' Id. (citations omitted). By pleading guilty, Rosa admitted that the State had carried this burden. On an affirmative defense, by contrast, the defendant bears the burden of proof. See N.Y. Penal Law § 25.00(2) (When a defense declared by statute to be an `affirmative defense' is raised at a trial, the defendant has the burden of establishing such defense by a preponderance of the evidence.). We are not convinced that by agreeing to plead guilty to Robbery in the First Degree, and therefore not asserting the affirmative defense that the object used during the crime was not a firearm, Rosa was conceding that he would have been unable to carry his burden of proving this affirmative defense had he decided to raise it at trial. First, in order to carry this burden, it seems that Rosa would have been required to go to trial and accept its additional expense and risks. As a practical matter, a principal goal of pleading guilty is to avoid trial, and the desire not to bear the costs of trial should not be a ground for an inference that the party could not prevail at trial. It is doubtful that the State would agree that its own abandonment of three other charges against Rosa in exchange for his agreement to plead guilty to First Degree Robbery could be viewed as an implicit concession that it could not carry its burden of proving these abandoned counts. Second, Padua, which involved a BB gun in evidence and an alleged second, unintroduced, gun that was real, suggests that the affirmative defense here comes into play only if the object  whether real gun or BB gun  was unloaded or inoperable. See Padua, 297 A.D.2d at 539, 747 N.Y.S.2d at 208 ([T]he affirmative defense to robbery in the first degree comes into play only when it is demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence that the gun was unloaded or inoperable  and there was no such evidence offered in this case with respect to either gun.). Therefore, if the object in Rosa's incident was a BB gun, and hence was not a firearm within the meaning of ACCA, Rosa could not have established the affirmative defense under § 160.15(4) if the BB gun was loaded. For this reason too, his decision to forgo any attempt to establish the affirmative defense does not necessarily imply that what was involved was a real gun. We doubt, moreover, that Shepard and, as the plurality in Shepard suggested, Apprendi, allow such an inference to be drawn. The waiver argument would permit the government to circumvent Shepard 's requirement that district courts limit their consideration to particular documents that can identify the underlying facts of a prior conviction with certainty. We think that the fundamental problem underlying the district court's reliance on inferences from waiver of an affirmative defense, or on the Bill of Particulars, the Federal PSR, the State PSR, the state sentencing transcript, or any other part of the state record, for its conclusion that the gun involved was a firearm is precisely the fact that the district court looked to the evidence before it and drew its own inferences rather than determining what inferences were compelled by the state record of conviction. See Sentencing Tr. at 25 (find[ing] that the record here supports . . . that the defendant is a career criminal under the Guidelines). Permitting a district court to make such factual findings thus threatens to violate the Jones-Apprendi constitutional rule that any fact other than a prior conviction sufficient to raise the limit of the possible federal sentence must be found by a jury, in the absence of any waiver of rights by the defendant. Shepard, 544 U.S. at 24, 125 S.Ct. 1254 (opinion of Souter, J.). Unlike the police reports that the majority in Shepard refused to permit the district court to consult, which, according to the Shepard dissenters, ma[de] inescapable the conclusion that, at each guilty plea, Shepard understood himself to be admitting the crime of breaking into a building, id. at 31, 125 S.Ct. 1254 (O'Connor, J., dissenting), we think it clear from the plea transcript that neither Rosa nor the court understood Rosa to be admitting that what was displayed was an actual firearm. Thus, the evidence the district court relied on here seems less reliable than that on which the district court relied in Shepard, and which the Supreme Court found unsound. The district court's conclusion that Rosa was subject to the ACCA's fifteen-year mandatory minimum therefore relied on an improper factual finding based on evidence outside the scope of what is permitted by Shepard.