Court Opinion

ID: 9847523
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 04:01:24.763852+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:17:19.230470
License: Public Domain

COLE, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the outcome of the majority’s opinion, but write separately because I disagree with the majority’s conclusion that Alexander failed to preserve his motion to compel discovery when he entered a conditional plea preserving his right to appeal the denial of his motion to suppress. (Maj.Op. 504-05.)
In this case, the motion to suppress and the motion to compel discovery were dependent on one another, as Alexander filed the motion to compel discovery for the sole purpose of discovering evidence that would support the motion to suppress. This much is evident by a review of Alexander’s initial discovery motion that was filed along with his motion to suppress, the arguments made in his motion to suppress that reference the necessity of acquiring the information listed in the discovery request, Alexander’s motion to compel discovery, and the district court’s denial of the motion to compel discovery as moot given its denial of Alexander’s motion to suppress. For these reasons, I conclude that Alexander’s conditional plea preserved both of these issues for review. Accordingly, I would reach the issue but affirm the district court’s denial of the motion for the reasons given by the district court.
The authority cited by the majority does not support an opposite conclusion. The case cited for direct support, United States v. Martin, 526 F.3d 926 (6th Cir.2008), involved a determination of whether a defendant had preserved a sufficiency-of-the-evidence claim. This motion was not related to the conditional guilty plea’s preservation of a motion to suppress, id. at 932, and therefore the determination made by the Court is not applicable to the situation before us. Similarly, in the Ninth Circuit case cited by the majority, United States v. Chae Wan Chon, 210 F.3d 990 (9th Cir.2000), the court concluded that both the motion to suppress and the motion to compel discovery were preserved because they were both explicitly included in the guilty plea. However, these motions were independent from one another, as the discovery request included a request for information that would support the defendants’ theory of defense, which was not at issue in their motion to suppress. Id. at 994-95. Further, that court did conclude that a third issue had not been preserved because it was not included in the conditional plea, but explicitly stated that this non-preserved motion was “independent” from the preserved motions and “separate *506and apart from” those that had been preserved. Id. at 995.
I agree that Federal Rule 11(a)(2) and our Court’s jurisprudence provide that “[wjhere a defendant does not specify an issue for preservation on appeal, federal courts have normally held that Rule 11(a)(2) bars its presentation on appeal.” Martin, 526 F.3d at 932. However, I also note that Rule 11(a)(2) was “necessary precisely ... to avoid the expense of trial whén all parties agree that the only dis-positive issues remaining are those properly raised in pretrial motions.” United States v. Pickett, 941 F.2d 411, 417 (6th Cir.1991). In this instance, the “dispositive issue” remaining is whether the district court properly denied Alexander’s motion to suppress; the motion to compel discovery involves only requests for information that support the motion to suppress. Rule 11(a)(2) does not bar this type of issue from review on appeal, but instead bars defendants from “rais[ing] subsequently collateral challenges to his conviction.” Id. at 416. Accordingly, Alexander’s motion to compel discovery should be considered preserved.