Court Opinion

ID: 9767228
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 05:13:25.593675+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:29.624730
License: Public Domain

*223SPAETH, Judge,
dissenting:
I believe that the Commonwealth’s reason for delaying the probation violation hearing is unacceptable. I should therefore reinstate the sentence to probation as extended at the hearing on July 11, 1977.
When appellant pleaded guilty to the federal charges, on January 16, his counsel notified the Probation Office and requested that it “set up a probation violation hearing.” N.T. 11. This was before appellant had been sentenced. Id. Counsel explained to the Probation Office that at his request, made to the federal judge who was to sentence appellant, appellant was being held in the detention center in Philadelphia, and would be held there for two weeks after being sentenced, so that a probation violation hearing could be set up. N.T. 11-12. In addition, counsel stated that he would stipulate to appellant’s conviction on the federal charges. There was therefore no reason for the Probation Office not to schedule a probation violation hearing at once. To refuse to schedule a hearing until a certified copy of the record of appellant’s federal conviction had been received was entirely arbitrary. It amounted to an insistence upon a given bureaucratic procedure, simply because that was the procedure that had been followed in other cases, and gave no thought to the fact that in the circumstances of this case it was a meaningless procedure. The majority’s approval of such “red tape” effectively reads out of Rule 1409 the requirement that a probation violation hearing be scheduled “as speedily as possible.” 1
*224The Commonwealth suggests, however, that appellant suffered no prejudice because of the eight months’ delay in scheduling his probation violation hearing. Brief for Commonwealth at 6-7. The record is to the contrary. Appellant testified that pending his probation violation hearing, he was .regarded by the federal authorities as “in transit.” As a result, he said, he was out of the prison population, instead being kept in solitary confinement (“in the hole”). N.T. 19. He was therefore unable to participate in any of the training programs offered the other federal prisoners, with the result that he couldn't earn “good time” on his federal sentence. N.T. 19-20. • This testimony, which was uncontradicted, establishes prejudice. At the probation violation hearing, the lower court remarked that “[w]e didn’t put him [appellant] in in transit status in the first place,” and that “we have no control over [the federal authorities].” N.T. 18. While of course true, these remarks were beside the point. The lower court—the Probation Office—did have control over when the probation violation hearing would be scheduled. Had it been scheduled “as speedily as possible,” as required by Rule 1409, specifically, had it been scheduled while appellant was in the detention center in Philadelphia, before he was placed in transit, as appellant’s counsel requested, appellant would not have been deprived for eight months of the opportunity to earn good time.
The judgment of sentence should be vacated and the sentence to probation, as extended at the hearing on July 11, 1977, reinstated.

. When before the lower court, the assistant district attorney defended the Probation Office’s requirement of a certified copy of appellant’s federal conviction by arguing that "if [appellant's counsel] came to court and changed his mind that day, we’d be thrown out.” N.T. 26-27. In its brief to us the Commonwealth does not repeat this argument, so we might regard it as abandoned, but it is in any case without merit. Even if appellant’s counsel had reneged on his promise to stipulate to appellant’s conviction—and there is no basis for supposing he would have—nothing would have been simpler than to put appellant on the stand and ask whether he had not pleaded guilty to the federal charges. There is thus no basis for the assertion that the Commonwealth would have been "thrown out” of the hearing because it didn’t have a certified copy of appellant’s conviction on the *224federal charges. Furthermore, if, because of appellant’s or his counsel’s conduct, the Commonwealth were “thrown out,” appellant could not now argue that he 'had been denied a speedy violation hearing; the lack of speed would have been his own doing.