Opinion ID: 201515
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Validity of the Guilty Pleas.

Text: 12 In supplemental briefing and a letter submitted pursuant to Fed. R.App. P. 28(j), the appellant maintains that his pleas as to all five counts must be set aside because they were not entered in conformity with Fed.R.Crim.P. 11. To elaborate, he insists that his pleas were not tendered intelligently because they were based upon a mistaken understanding of the operation of the federal sentencing guidelines. Although a guilty plea waives most claims of error, it does not preclude an attack on the voluntary and intelligent character of the plea itself. See Tollett v. Henderson, 411 U.S. 258, 267, 93 S.Ct. 1602, 36 L.Ed.2d 235 (1973). 13 This claim derives from the Supreme Court's recent decision in United States v. Booker, ___ U.S. ___, 125 S.Ct. 738, 160 L.Ed.2d 621 (2005). The Booker Court held that [a]ny fact (other than a prior conviction) which is necessary to support a sentence exceeding the maximum authorized by the facts established by a plea of guilty or a jury verdict must be admitted by the defendant or proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, id. at 756, insofar as the sentence is imposed under a mandatory guideline regime, see id. at 756-57, 767-68. The appellant posits that his guilty pleas are invalid because they were not informed by that holding (and, thus, were tendered on the erroneous assumption that the sentencing guidelines were mandatory). 14 We have heard and rejected this argument before. See United States v. Sahlin, 399 F.3d 27, 31 (1st Cir.2005) (holding that the possibility of a favorable change in the law occurring after a plea is one of the normal risks that accompany a guilty plea); see also Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. 742, 757, 90 S.Ct. 1463, 25 L.Ed.2d 747 (1970) (stating that a voluntary plea of guilty intelligently made in light of the then applicable law does not become vulnerable because later judicial decisions indicate that the plea rested on a faulty premise). Under the doctrine of stare decisis, then, the issue is foreclosed. See Eulitt v. Me. Dep't of Educ., 386 F.3d 344, 348 (1st Cir.2004) (explaining that the doctrine of stare decisis precludes the relitigation of legal issues that have previously been heard and authoritatively determined); Gately v. Massachusetts, 2 F.3d 1221, 1226 (1st Cir.1993) (stating that stare decisis renders the ruling of law in a case binding in future cases before the same court or other courts owing obedience to the decision). As we explained in Sahlin, 399 F.3d at 31, the Booker decision, in and of itself, does not undermine the validity of the appellant's guilty pleas.