Opinion ID: 405038
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Consequences of the Guilty Plea

Text: 10 Garrett argues that he was not adequately informed of the consequences of his guilty plea because he was not told his conviction in Seattle could act as an enhancing prior conviction .... Opening Brief for Appellant at 10. 11 Fed.R.Crim.P. 11 requires that a defendant must be informed of the direct, but not the collateral, consequences of his plea. United States v. King, 618 F.2d 550, 553 (9th Cir. 1980). The Ninth Circuit has not specifically addressed the issue of whether sentence enhancement is a collateral consequence. Other courts, however, have treated enhancement as a collateral consequence. See, e.g., Wright v. United States, 624 F.2d 557, 561 (5th Cir. 1980); Weinstein v. United States, 325 F.Supp. 597, 600 (C.D.Cal.1981). Garrett attempts to distinguish these cases and to characterize any resulting enhancement in his case as a direct consequence on the basis of magnitude and immediacy. Opening Brief for Appellant at 10. This court has not focused on the magnitude of potential enhancement nor the proximity in time to the guilty plea as factors that are important to the determination of whether a consequence of the plea is direct or collateral. For instance, in Fruchtman v. Kenton, 531 F.2d 946 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 895, 97 S.Ct. 256, 50 L.Ed.2d 178 (1976), the issue was whether a deportation proceeding was a direct or collateral consequence of a guilty plea. Id. at 949. The fact that the deportation proceeding was one over which the trial judge had no control and no responsibility was important to the analysis of whether it was a direct or a collateral consequence. We declined to impose on the trial judge what would become an unmanageable burden of advising the defendant of such a consequence. Id. Thus, the deportation proceeding was deemed to be a collateral consequence. Id. 12 In the instant case, the Florida criminal proceeding is one over which the district court had no control and no responsibility. Based on the rationale in Fruchtman, any enhancement of Garrett's sentence by the Florida court is a collateral consequence of his guilty plea in the district court below.