Opinion ID: 2281794
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Beyond Viers: Is CR 60.02 a Proper Avenue for Relief from Judicial Errors?

Text: As a prefatory matter, we must first note that the fact that the case at hand is a criminal action does not foreclose the availability of CR 60.02 relief since that rule applies to both civil and criminal cases. [20] The question becomes, therefore, whether CR 60.02 is a proper mechanism for seeking relief from a judicial error after the time for filing a direct appeal has expired. CR 60.02 is a codification of the ancient common law writ of coram nobis. [21] CR 60.02 did not expand the scope of the writ of coram nobis. [22] So in order to be cognizable, a CR 60.02 motion must fall within at least one of the three purposes of the writ of coram nobis: The purpose of coram nobis was to bring pronounced judgment errors before the court which (1) had not been heard or litigated, (2) were not known or could not have been known by the party through the exercise of due diligence, or (3) the party was prevented from presenting due to duress, fear, or some other sufficient cause. [23] Consequently, relief under CR 60.02 is available only to resolve issues that could not have been raised at trial, on direct appeal, or by a motion for relief under RCr 11.42. [24] There is no indication in this case that had it exercised due diligence, the Commonwealth could not have raised the improper awarding of jail-time credit to Winstead on direct appeal. So CR 60.02 is an inappropriate vehicle for seeking jail-time credit relief in this case. What is more, the writ of coram nobis was aimed at correcting factual errors, not legal errors. ... [25] And current precedent holds that CR 60.02 is not available to correct a judicial error. [26] So CR 60.02 relief is inappropriate in this case for two reasons: (1) any error in awarding Winstead jail-time credit could easily have been raised via direct appeal had the Commonwealth exercised due diligence, and (2) precedent holds that CR 60.02 is not available as a vehicle to correct judicial errors. [27] We are aware, as was the trial court, that current precedent's conclusion that CR 60.02 cannot properly be used to correct judicial errors seems to contradict the Court of Appeals' three-decades old, terse opinion in Duncan v. Commonwealth. [28] In Duncan, the defendant filed a motion for the trial court to amend its judgment to reflect credit for all time spent in custody prior to the entry of the final judgment. [29] That motion was filed about eighteen months after sentencing. [30] Although the motion for additional jail-time credit did not openly invoke CR 60.02, the Court of Appeals held that it was evident that the appellant's motion was made pursuant to CR 60.02 rather than RCr 11.42. [31] The Court of Appeals' terse opinion did not analyze whether any error in the jail-time credit award was judicial or clerical in nature. Instead, the Court of Appeals held that Duncan's motion was untimely because it was made more than one year after the trial court entered its final judgment, in contravention of CR 60.02's one-year time limit for motions based upon mistake. [32] But Duncan does not address our predecessor Court's prior holdings in Roberts and James that CR 60.02 is not a proper mechanism to attempt to correct judicial errors. And Duncan himself did not actually believe he had filed a CR 60.02 motion. The Court of Appeals merely construed the motion to have been brought under CR 60.02. Duncan has been cited in many opinions, principally unpublished, for the proposition that a motion for correction of an allegedly erroneous jail-time credit award is treated as a motion brought under CR 60.02. [33] But, as we have already explained, CR 60.02 is unavailable to correct judicial errors and is unavailable to correct an error that due diligence would have permitted to have been raised on direct appeal. So to the extent that Duncan stands for the proposition that CR 60.02 is a proper procedural vehicle to address judicial errors, such as the improper awarding of jail-time credit, Duncan and its progeny are overruled. [34] By concluding that CR 60.02 relief is unavailable to correct judicial errors, we by no means endorse the admittedly improper jail-time credit award in this case. But the Commonwealth's decision to attempt to rectify that error via CR 60.02 runs counter to two lines of clear precedent: one holds that CR 60.02 is unavailable to rectify judicial errors and the other holds that CR 60.02 relief does not lie to correct errors that were, or could have been, raised on direct appeal. So correcting the judicial error in this one case would require us to overturn well-established precedent, destabilizing this entire area of the law. We refuse to jettison settled precedent and to bend our rules in order to grant relief to the Commonwealth in this one case, especially when the Commonwealth itself failed to object to the error in a timely manner.