Court Opinion

ID: 9469051
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:30:39.78557+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:11.284041
License: Public Domain

HEANEY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I join the Court in holding that the in-custody requirement for habeas relief bars petitioner’s attack on his 1969 jury conviction. I dissent, however, from invoking laches to bar petitioner’s claims in connection with his 1969 guilty plea.
The petitioner was convicted by a jury of burglary in 1969, for which he received a five-year prison term. At the same time, he pled guilty to an unrelated burglary and received a fifteen-year suspended sentence. He was paroled from the five-year term in 1971. In 1973, the petitioner was convicted of a new burglary offense in St. Francis County, for which he received a twenty-one-year term. Based upon this new St. Francis County conviction, the 1969 suspended sentence was revoked and a fifteen-year term was imposed to run consecutively *706with the twenty-one-year term imposed on the St. Francis conviction.
Although the petitioner did not attempt to attack the 1969 guilty plea in a federal court until the present action was commenced in 1979, his delay was not, in my view, unreasonable. From 1969 to 1974, the petitioner was never incarcerated based upon the guilty plea. The fifteen-year sentence had been suspended and had no effect whatsoever until the suspension was revoked in 1974 and a fifteen-year consecutive term was imposed. After that revocation and through the present action in 1979, the petitioner pursued several attacks in state court on both the St. Francis County conviction and the 1969 guilty plea. He also sought and was denied federal habeas relief on the St. Francis conviction during this period. The petitioner explains that he did not attack the 1969 plea and suspension in federal court until he had exhausted his state and federal attacks on the St. Francis conviction. Because the suspension was revoked only due to the St. Francis conviction, he reasoned that overturning that conviction would also lead to relief from the revocation. This legal reasoning is hardly flawless, but it does explain the petitioner’s delay and, in my view, precludes finding that the delay was so unreasonable as to bar federal review of his claim.
As the majority notes, supra, at 704, even if the petitioner’s delay is thought unreasonable, he is still entitled to federal review of his claim unless the state has been so prejudiced by the delay that such review would be unfair. In my view, the record does not establish such prejudice.
The most significant evidence lost during the passage of time was destroyed by action of the state. It seems inexcusable to allow the state to destroy evidence and then claim prejudice by virtue of such destruction. Here, the relevant evidence consisted of transcript notes of the 1969 plea and sentencing proceeding, which were destroyed with court approval in 1978. The state contends that the petitioner had the duty to preserve his record. Under the circumstances of this case, however, I believe the state had a burden to preserve at least this much of the record. The state knew that the fifteen-year suspended sentence in 1969 meant that the petitioner would face potential revocation for many years to come and that a challenge to the plea and sentence might not arise until a prison term was actually imposed. In fact, after a term was imposed, the petitioner did attack the plea and sentence in a state court action and did request a transcript of the plea proceedings in 1977 — when such records were still available. The state contends he did not make a proper showing of entitlement to the transcript. Even if this contention by the state is valid, the petitioner’s request put the state on notice that the 1969 plea was under attack and that the transcript would be relevant. The state nonetheless destroyed the transcript notes in 1978 and now claims prejudice from its own actions. I cannot accept such an application of the equitable doctrine of laches.
The petitioner also claims that it was impermissible to impose his suspended sentence as a consecutive term because, as a matter of Arkansas law, the sentence must be presumed to have been concurrent with the 1969 five-year sentence. See supra, at n.5; Williams v. State, 229 Ark. 42, 313 S.W.2d 242 (1958). This is a legal claim largely unaffected by the state’s destruction of evidence. Because neither the magistrate, district court nor this Court have passed on such a claim, the petitioner remains free to raise it in an appropriate proceeding.