Opinion ID: 526038
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Misunderstood Plea Bargain.

Text: 14 Pellerito claims that his trial attorney, Emanuel Moore, led him to believe that, as part of the plea agreement, he would receive immunity from threatened prosecutions in New York and Florida. He contends alternatively that, for whatever reason, he thought (erroneously) that further prosecutions in other jurisdictions would be barred, thus rendering his guilty plea involuntary. 2 The district court found defendant's claim that Moore misled him to be not credible. Id. at 294. Among other things, the court pointed to testimony by Pellerito's local counsel, attorney Julio Morales-Sanchez, that it had been explained to Pellerito that the plea agreement was not binding on other jurisdictions. Id. The decision to believe Morales-Sanchez on this point, rather than appellant, was the trial judge's to make and should not be disturbed. 15 Defendant's professed belief that, regardless of what he was told, he would be held harmless from prosecutions in other jurisdictions, is material only to the extent it was objectively reasonable. United States v. Hogan, 862 F.2d 386, 388 (1st Cir.1988). Here, it was not. First, Pellerito had ample incentive to plead wholly apart from fear of mushrooming prosecutions. Because the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, 21 U.S.C. Sec. 960, did not apply to the plea as structured, and the plea agreement obligated the prosecutor to recommend a maximum sentence of 18 years (a recommendation that the trial court followed), appellant's potential exposure was lowered materially. 3 16 Second, during the change-of-plea hearing, defendant assured the district judge that no other promises had been made, no other terms negotiated. There was no suggestion that immunity from prosecution elsewhere had been considered, let alone guaranteed. As the court below perspicaciously observed, it strains credibility to suggest that [defendant's supposed] misconception as to the grant of immunity would not have come to light in the lengthy, detailed Rule 11 colloquy. Pellerito, 701 F.Supp. at 295. We will not permit a defendant to turn his back on his own representations to the court merely because it would suit his convenience to do so. 17 It is true that, at one point during the Rule 11 proceedings, defendant stated that he was pleading to conspiracy enterprise in Puerto Rico, New York, New Jersey and Florida. Counsel seizes upon this single locution and claims it proves that Pellerito believed his plea was intended to foreclose prosecution in other venues. It is possible that such an inference might be drawn from Pellerito's response--but it is certainly not the only permissible inference, nor even the most plausible one. The defendant was pleading guilty to participation in a multistate conspiracy. He could simply have been describing the places where, in his view, the drug-trafficking combine operated. At any rate, we are reluctant to place the weight of decision on an isolated reference in a long and thorough Rule 11 inquiry, in the process overruling the contrary determination of the judge who presided at both the plea-tendering and plea-withdrawal hearings, and who saw and heard the principals. Having read the entire record, we believe there was ample support for the district court's finding that defendant's claimed failure to understand the terms of his plea agreement was imaginary rather than real. 4 Pellerito, 701 F.Supp. at 295. 18