Opinion ID: 2576422
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: The Conditional Plea

Text: The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure allow a defendant to enter a conditional guilty plea. Fed.R.Crim.P. 11(a)(2) (2005). Through this procedure, a defendant may plead guilty on the condition that an appellate court will review a specified ruling of the trial court. Id. If the defendant prevails on appeal, he is permitted to withdraw his guilty plea. Id. The purpose of the conditional plea is to allow a defendant, certain to lose at trial due to admission of evidence he sought to suppress, to challenge the suppression without forcing the court to conduct a trial that essentially is a fait accompli. U.S. ex rel. Rogers v. Warden of Attica State Prison, 381 F.2d 209, 214 (2d Cir.1967). Colorado does not have a rule analogous to the federal conditional plea rule. We have specifically disapproved of the conditional guilty plea in the context of a constitutional challenge to a statute. See People v. Pharr, 696 P.2d 235, 236 (Colo.1984). In that case we found no basis in rule or statute to allow a defendant to plead guilty while reserving his right to appeal the constitutionality of the statute. Id. Although we have not ruled on the legitimacy of the practice of pleading guilty on condition of appeal of a suppression issue, the court of appeals recently opened the door to this practice when it heard a suppression issue that came to it pursuant to a conditional plea agreement. People v. Bachofer, 85 P.3d 615, 617 (Colo.App.2003). In Bachofer, that court agreed to hear the denial of a suppression motion, giving as its reason judicial economy, where the parties stipulated to the conditional plea of guilty. [5] While Bachofer has been cited in Colorado practice materials, [6] we have never explicitly endorsed this view. Unlike Bachofer, here, neither the prosecution nor the trial court accepted McMurtry's guilty plea as a conditional guilty plea. Instead, the court indicated that appeals courts would have to decide the validity of conditional guilty pleas [7] and the prosecutor made no representations about the plea being conditional. The court then warned McMurtry that an appellate court may find that his plea agreement waived his right to appeal the decision not to dismiss the case. Confident that McMurtry understood his rights and the ramifications of his plea, the court accepted McMurtry's plea of guilty. While McMurtry's attorney did attempt to reserve his right to appeal the court's denial of his motion to dismiss, the court did not accept his plea as conditional and a conditional plea was not preserved in writing as required by the federal statute. Thus, even were we to accept the federal practice of allowing the use of conditional pleas, a conditional plea did not occur in this case. [8] We leave to another day the issue of whether the conditional plea is an acceptable practice in Colorado.