Court Opinion

ID: 9527014
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:26:51.333846+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:25:23.448929
License: Public Domain

DeBRULER, Justice,
concurring.
This is an appeal from the judgment of the trial court, denying a third petition for post-conviction relief. The problem posed by such successive petitions for post-conviction relief has been recently addressed by this Court by amendment to the Rule governing post-conviction remedies. Particularly, Section 12 has been added. While that amendment was not in effect at the time of the trial court’s judgment denying this third petition and is not therefore applicable in this case, its existence and potential application in these circumstances is worth noting.
In all petitions, initial or successive, the petitioner must allege grounds for post-conviction relief, i.e., for relief from a conviction or sentence. It is a ground for post-conviction relief that defense counsel at trial on a charge resulting in conviction did not provide constitutionally effective legal assistance. It is not a ground for post-conviction relief that petitioner’s counsel in a prior post-conviction proceeding did not provide adequate legal assistance; rather, an allegation of a failure to provide such appropriate legal assistance is an avenue for the petitioner to avoid a State’s answer pleading prior adjudication or abuse of the post-conviction process.
A likely pleading scenario for the present case under the new Section 12 would have been the filing of this third petition with a completed Successive Post-Conviction Relief Rule 1 Petition Form. This third petition, like the first petition, would have alleged the ineffective assistance of trial defense counsel, supported by specific actions and omissions. The State would have filed an answer pleading that the job of trial defense counsel had been previously challenged and finally adjudicated in the first post-conviction proceeding, that any deficiency in that previous adjudication had not been raised in the second post-conviction proceedings initiated by appellant, and that the failure to have done so renders the raising of it in this third post-conviction petition an abuse of the post-conviction process. Appellant would have then had the opportunity to reply to the answer by alleging that counsel had failed to render a level of representation consonant with due process of law in the first post-conviction proceeding and explaining why he had not again alleged the ineffective assistance of trial defense counsel in his second petition for post-conviction relief. The trial court would then have either sustained or denied the State’s answers of prior adjudication and abuse of process. Only in the event of a rejection of the State’s answer would the court reach the merits for the second time of the alleged ground for post-conviction relief, i.e., that trial defense counsel had *1015not provided constitutionally sufficient legal counsel.
SHEPARD, C.J., and DICKSON, J., concur.