Opinion ID: 71897
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the supreme court's brady

Text: 34 DECISION DOES NOT ABROGATE THE REQUIREMENT THAT GUILTY PLEAS MUST BE KNOWING AND VOLUNTARY 35 The government contends that Brown's guilty plea was sufficiently knowing and voluntary, even though he was misinformed about the elements of the charged offense, because the source of the misinformation was this Court's then-applicable Brown decision. For that proposition, the government relies on Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. 742, 90 S.Ct. 1463, 25 L.Ed.2d 747 (1970). We think the government misapprehends the Supreme Court's Brady decision. 36 Brady involved a petitioner who had pleaded guilty to a federal charge of kidnapping. Id. at 743, 90 S.Ct. at 1466. Under the law applicable when Brady entered his guilty plea, he could have been sentenced to death if his case had been tried to a jury and the jury had so recommended. Id. Apparently to escape the possibility of a death sentence, Brady elected to plead guilty. Id. Several years later, the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty provision of the kidnapping statute to which Brady had pleaded guilty, holding that that provision imposed an unconstitutional burden on the right to trial by jury. United States v. Jackson, 390 U.S. 570, 572, 88 S.Ct. 1209, 1211, 20 L.Ed.2d 138 (1968). Brady filed a § 2255 motion, claiming that his guilty plea had been unconstitutionally coerced by the death penalty provision of the federal kidnapping statute. The district court denied relief, and the Tenth Circuit affirmed. Brady, 397 U.S. at 744-45, 90 S.Ct. at 1466-67. 37 The Supreme Court granted certiorari and affirmed the decision that Brady's guilty plea was voluntarily made. In so holding, the Court rejected the argument that Brady's guilty plea should be set aside on the ground that he had mistakenly concluded that the only way to avoid the possibility of a death sentence was to enter a guilty plea. Because of its importance, we quote the Supreme Court's reasoning at length: 38 The rule that a plea must be intelligently made to be valid does not require that a plea be vulnerable to later attack if the defendant did not correctly assess every relevant factor entering into his decision. A defendant is not entitled to withdraw his plea merely because he discovers long after the plea has been accepted that his calculus misapprehended the quality of the State's case or the likely penalties attached to alternative courses of action. More particularly, absent misrepresentation or other impermissible conduct by state agents, a voluntary plea of guilty intelligently made in the light of the then applicable law does not become vulnerable because later judicial decisions indicate that the plea rested on a faulty premise. A plea of guilty triggered by the expectations of a competently counseled defendant that the State will have a strong case against him is not subject to later attack because the defendant's lawyer correctly advised him with respect to the then existing law as to possible penalties but later pronouncements of the courts, as in this case, hold that the maximum penalty for the crime in question was less than was reasonably assumed at the time the plea was entered. 39 The fact that Brady did not anticipate United States v. Jackson, supra, does not impugn the truth or reliability of his plea. We find no requirement in the Constitution that a defendant must be permitted to disown his solemn admissions in open court that he committed the act with which he is charged simply because it later develops that the State would have had a weaker case than the defendant had thought or that the maximum penalty then assumed applicable has been held inapplicable in subsequent judicial decisions. 40 Id. at 756-57, 90 S.Ct. at 1473 (citation omitted). 41 According to the government, Brady means that Brown's guilty plea merely rested on a faulty premise and that the plea is not subject to collateral attack because it was intelligently made in the light of the then applicable law. We disagree. Brady did not undermine that first and most universally recognized requirement of due process that a guilty plea is not voluntary unless the defendant receives real notice of the true nature of the charge against him. Henderson, 426 U.S. at 645, 96 S.Ct. at 2257 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 42 In Brady, there was no issue concerning whether the defendant had been adequately and accurately informed of the elements of the charged offense. Brady's claim that his plea was constitutionally involuntary rested solely upon his misapprehension of the anticipated costs of not pleading guilty, i.e., that he would face the possibility of the death penalty unless he pleaded guilty. In light of the Supreme Court's subsequent Jackson decision, that assessment was wrong, because Brady would have been able to avoid the death penalty in any event (provided, of course, that he had not been executed in the interim). In the Supreme Court's words, Brady misapprehended the likely penalties attached to alternative courses of action. Id. at 757, 90 S.Ct. at 1473. Unlike Brown in the present case, Brady did not misapprehend any element of the crime with which he was charged. 43 Essentially, the Supreme Court's Brady decision stands for the proposition that the Constitution is not violated by the consequences of strategic miscalculations concerning the evidentiary strength of the government's case or concerning the penalties that may be imposed upon conviction. Brady's strategic miscalculations did not impugn the truth or reliability of his plea in which he admitted that he committed the act with which he [was] charged, id. at 757, 90 S.Ct. at 1473-74, because he was made aware of the charge against him and was aware of precisely what he was doing when he admitted [commission of the crime], id. at 756, 90 S.Ct. at 1473. By contrast, in this case, Brown was made aware of the true nature of the charges against him only after he had entered his plea, when the Supreme Court decided Ratzlaf. Unlike Brady's strategic miscalculations, Brown's misapprehension concerning the critical elements of his charged offense substantially undermines the reliability of his plea. Brown has never admitted all the elements of the crime with which he was charged. 5 44 The one critical element of the structuring offense as authoritatively defined by the Supreme Court that Brown has never admitted is that he acted with knowledge that his conduct was unlawful, Ratzlaf, 510 U.S. at 137, 114 S.Ct. at 657. Because Brown was specifically and affirmatively misinformed that such knowledge was not an element of the crime, his guilty plea was made in ignorance of the true nature of the charge against him, Henderson, 426 U.S. at 645, 96 S.Ct. at 2257 (emphasis added) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). Accordingly, the rule of Brady does not govern this case, and the availability of § 2255 relief to Brown depends entirely upon whether Ratzlaf 's authoritative construction of the crime with which Brown was charged is applicable to his case. We turn now to that question. 45