Court Opinion

ID: 9627949
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:00:36.451122+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:06:52.834741
License: Public Domain

MARTONE, Justice,
dissenting.
While I agree with the court that the state did not get the petition to revoke resolved in a timely manner, the court bases its finding of prejudice on a claim that was not made in the trial court, or in the court of appeals, and that, in any event, is without substance.
The court says that “on one score, prejudice has clearly been shown: the loss of an opportunity to have the prison sentence imposed for probation violation run concurrently with the federal prison sentence.” Ante, at 443. But this idea is both procedurally and substantively without merit.
It is procedurally without merit because this is not the defendant’s argument. He did not raise this claim in the trial court. Nor did he raise it on appeal. The idea first emerged in the dissenting opinion in the court of appeals. Relying on the dissent, the defendant states the idea in a single sentence in the petition for review. The defendant actually argues presumed prejudice, a concept which we reject.
I suspect that the defendant never argued that he would be prejudiced by the lost opportunity of a concurrent sentence because there is no substance to the claim. The majority relies upon the letter from Mesh to Katz dated June 20,1994. But the letter was written in 1994 in the face of a July 31, 1995 federal release date. As the letter points out, even if a concurrent sentence had been imposed, the federal and state sentences would not have been coterminous. There would have been very little overlap (certainly less than one year) even if a state sentence had been imposed concurrently at that point. In other words, by June of 1994, it did not matter much whether it was concurrent or consecutive. The 1994 letter does not support the conclusion that “[h]ad defendant been sentenced when he should have been, he may well have been able to serve most or all of his state time while he was serving his federal time.” Ante, at 443-444. There is no evidence in this case to support that proposition.
Indeed, the contrary is true. In January of 1995, while there was still an opportunity for some relief by way of concurrent sentence, Adler was sentenced to four years in prison consecutive to the federal sentence. We thus know for a fact that there was no lost opportunity. The court of appeals was correct when it noted that there was “no reasonable prospect of receiving concurrent sentences from an Arizona court that was aware of his probation violations and his federal convictions.” State v. Adler, 187 Ariz. 572, 575, 931 P.2d 1082, 1085 (App. 1996).
*286Because the record fails to support a non-speculative finding of prejudice, I respectfully dissent.