Opinion ID: 788658
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Putative Exception to the Time Limit as a Procedural Bar

Text: 33 Johnson claims that he did not actually violate a state procedural rule because his case falls into a well-recognized exception to the five-year time limit. Citing a New Jersey Supreme Court decision, State v. Milne, 178 N.J. 486, 842 A.2d 140, 144 (2004), Johnson contends that when a new case is announced, which provides relief not previously available to the defendant, the New Jersey courts permit the five-year time limitation to run from the date of that new decision. Johnson points to State v. Kiett, 121 N.J. 483, 582 A.2d 630 (1990), which he says opened such a new avenue of relief by holding that a defendant who entered a guilty plea to avoid imposition of the death penalty, but who cannot be put to death as a matter of law, labors under the kind of mistake that entitles him or her to withdraw the plea. Id. at 633. 34 Johnson's arguments are unavailing on several counts. First, New Jersey precedent does not support his claim that there is an automatic new law exception to the five-year time limit. While State v. Milne reasoned that new law can, in certain compelling circumstances, reset the five-year clock, 842 A.2d at 144, Milne considered the extent and cause of the delay, the prejudice to the State, and the importance of petitioner's claim in determining whether there has been an injustice sufficient to relax the time limits before allowing any exception to the time bar. Id. at 143-44 (internal quotation marks omitted). Thus, the new law exception is by no means automatic, but rather requires a balancing of interests. In Milne, the defendant tried to raise his claim more than five years after the new law had been handed down. Although that was the primary rationale for the New Jersey Supreme court's rejection of petitioner's claim in that case, the court also expressed strong reservations about the prospect of reviewing a sixteen-year old conviction as it would entail substantial prejudice to the State and cause difficulties and hardships to the system. Id. at 144. In Johnson's case the guilty plea and conviction are twenty-one years old, and certainly the State's ability to put on a trial at this late date would be seriously handicapped. 35 Second, it is not clear that Kiett should be considered new grounds for relief, as there were several earlier cases which are congruent with Kiett 's holding. See State v. Nichols, 71 N.J. 358, 365 A.2d 467 (1976) (permitting defendant to withdraw guilty plea where he was misinformed about whether he could receive consecutive sentences for his involvement in an armed robbery if he went to trial); State v. Kovack, 91 N.J. 476, 453 A.2d 521, 524 (1982) (finding that a plea was not entered knowingly where the defendant was not informed of his parole ineligibility). While no prior New Jersey case specifically dealt with a mistake about death eligibility, these earlier cases afforded relief to petitioners who labored under mistakes about their eligibility for less grave sentences, so it would seem logical that such relief would a fortiori have been available to petitioners who were mistaken about eligibility for the death penalty. 3 36 At all events, the argument that Kiett opened a new avenue of relief is contradicted by the history of this case, for it is clear that Johnson was put on notice of the viability of his death-eligibility claim well before Kiett. The Appellate Division decision on direct appeal, in Johnson's own case, handed down in 1984, should have put Johnson on notice that the death-eligibility claim could have provided additional grounds for appeal. The Appellate Division specifically commented that it had not been called upon to determine whether misinformation about death eligibility prejudicially impacted the defendant's decision to plead guilty, implying that this omission was a mistake by Johnson's counsel. 37 Although he did not raise it in his first PCR petition to the trial court, Johnson included the death-eligibility claim in his petition for certification to the New Jersey Supreme Court, filed in 1989-one year before Kiett. In that petition, Johnson cited Nichols, supra, 71 N.J. 358, 365 A.2d 467, to support the proposition that the misinformation about his death eligibility rendered his plea involuntary and conceded that this issue could have (and should have) been raised on direct appeal. Johnson did not file his second PCR petition, raising the instant claim, until over a year after offering this admission in his petition to the New Jersey Supreme Court. 38 The fact that he was on notice that he could raise this claim as an avenue of relief, and failed to do so, seems to exclude Johnson's petition from the set of compelling cases that Milne contemplates for leniency.