Court Opinion

ID: 9719908
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 08:08:51.109571+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:11.105037
License: Public Domain

Cavanagh, J.
(dissenting). While the facts of this case raise some concerns with the operating mechanics of our court rules, I would address these concerns in their proper forum, rather than resort, as the majority does, to an ill-grounded and conclusory opinion which, I fear, will do little more than blur the lines that this case would seem to indicate need clarification.
i
As the transcript of the February 1, 1995, plea proceeding in this case demonstrates, and as the majority does not dispute, the plea in this matter was hopelessly defective. The district judge gave no advice whatsoever and asked nothing of the defendant;1 there was no recitation of a factual basis, nor any elicitation of a waiver of rights. In essence, defense counsel merely stated that the defendant was going to plead guilty, and the trial judge accepted the plea. It is these strange, and, one would hope, not often repeated, facts that underlie the current controversy.2
*616In reviewing the merits of the successor district judge’s ruling on the motion to withdraw the plea, I find it difficult indeed to even argue that there was an abuse of discretion in granting the motion. The court rule allowing the motion of withdrawal of district court guilty pleas is MCR 6.610(E)(7), which provides in part:
The following provisions apply where a defendant seeks to challenge the plea.
(a) A defendant may not challenge a plea on appeal unless the defendant moved in the trial court to withdraw the plea for noncompliance with these rules. Such a motion may be made either before or after sentence has been imposed.
(b) If the trial court determines that a deviation affecting substantial rights occurred, it shall correct the deviation and give the defendant the option of permitting the plea to stand or of withdrawing the plea. If the trial court determines either a deviation did not occur, or that the deviation did not affect substantial rights, it may permit the defendant to withdraw the plea only if it does not cause substantial prejudice to the people because of reliance on the plea. [Emphasis supplied.]
The rule, of course, permits denial of a motion to withdraw a plea if the prosecution would be prejudiced by such a withdrawal. It would be difficult to state that that would be the case here, given the availability of the testimony of the arresting police *617officers and the blood alcohol test.3 Indeed, the prosecutor makes no such argument before this Court, arguing only that the defendant’s efforts are collateral attacks on the conviction, to which the usual rules regarding requests for withdrawal of pleas would not apply.
n
The majority addresses two questions, the first being whether this attack is direct or collateral, and the second being, implicitly, whether that would even matter to this Court. With respect to the first question, the majority agrees that this motion for withdrawal of plea, coming within the case in which the conviction was entered, is “technically correct.” Ante at 610. I would agree with both the successor district judge and the circuit judge, as well as the Court of Appeals majority, and find that this challenge was indeed a direct attack on the conviction, with no need to offer the majority’s modifiers. As the Court of Appeals majority effectively noted:
The procedures for taking a plea in the district court, and for challenging such a plea, are addressed in MCR 6.610(E). Pursuant to subsection (7) (a) of that rule,
“[a] defendant may not challenge a plea on appeal unless the defendant moved in the trial court to withdraw the plea for noncompliance with these rules. Such a motion may be made either before or after sentence has been imposed.”
The rules applicable to the district court provide no time limit by which such a motion must be made, and we are not persuaded that we should look to the circuit court rules to *618establish a time limit for moving to withdraw a plea in the district court. Because the language of the court rule is clear, we should apply it as written. There being no time restrictions specified in MCR 6.610(E), we decline to construe this court rule as containing one. See People v Harris, 224 Mich App 597, 601; 569 NW2d 525 (1997). Moreover, we cannot assume that the drafters inadvertently omitted from one court rule the language placed in another court rule, and then, on the basis of that assumption, apply what is not there. Cf. Farrington v Total Petroleum, Inc, 442 Mich 201, 210; 501 NW2d 76 (1993).
While there is no time limit for filing a postjudgment motion to set aside a plea-based conviction, MCR 7.101(B)(1) provides a twenty-one-day period from the time of the entry of the order or judgment appealed from for (1) taking an appeal by right from the district court to the circuit court or (2) filing a motion for postjudgment relief in order to preserve an appeal by right. In this case, defendant’s motion to set aside his plea-based conviction was not filed within that period. However, under MCR 7.103(A)(2), a circuit court may grant leave to appeal from the district court after the time for taking an appeal under MCR 7.101(B)(1) has expired. Accordingly, if defendant had lost his motion in the district court, he may still have been able to take a direct appeal. To hold that a defendant may challenge his plea-based conviction only on direct appeal, and then to prevent him from taking one of the steps necessary to do so, would defy logic. Because we conclude that defendant’s challenge to his plea-based conviction was a direct attack, and the prosecution does not otherwise contest the merits of the district court’s decision to grant defendant’s motion, we hold that the district court did not abuse its discretion in granting defendant’s motion to set aside his plea-based conviction. [230 Mich App 95, 101-102; 583 NW2d 495 (1998).]
The majority relies heavily on People v Ingram, 439 Mich 288; 484 NW2d 241 (1992), while hypothesizing that the instant case “differ[s] somewhat,” in that the appeal in Ingram came to this Court as a challenge to *619the defendant’s circuit court conviction of OUIL 3d. Ante at 613. In other words, the Ingram defendant challenged his prior conviction by way of an appeal of a subsequent conviction, i.e., a collateral attack. That would seem to be, given the focus of the courts below and the majority on the distinction between direct and collateral attacks, more than a minor difference and, in fact, a substantial distinction.
In any event, given the majority’s holding, it would seem that we may short-circuit our discussion of the finer nuances of direct and collateral attacks because the majority simply summarily states that “we hold today that long delayed direct appeals are deemed collateral.” Ante at 614. I disagree with, and indeed have difficulty even following, the “logic” of the majority’s decision, which would cite our decision in Ingram, as well as various Court of Appeals decisions, and then render them, in effect, pointless. Under the majority’s rule, apparently supported only by analogy to People v Johnson, 386 Mich 305; 192 NW2d 482 (1971), and People v Curry, 142 Mich App 724; 371 NW2d 854 (1985) (cases that dealt with delays of five and fourteen years in bringing a motion for a new trial4), the majority seems to suggest that, if not brought within some as yet undefined expedient time frame that is not “long delayed,” all postconviction challenges are simply collateral. Ante at 614. While I certainly agree with the underlying suggestion of Johnson and Curry that new trial motions brought many years after conviction are disfavored, I would find nothing in the text or the rationale of those *620cases, dealing with delays that were of an entirely different magnitude (years versus months) than the delays herein, that would have any particular applicability to this case.
in
It would seem reasonably clear that the difficulty in this case results from the fact that our district court rules lack a time limit for bringing a motion to withdraw a plea. That would seem to be something of an aberrancy in our rules. This Court, in its administrative role, is well equipped to deal with those difficulties in application of our rules that become apparent in the course of usage. Should a majority of the Court believe that a case such as this is sufficiently likely to reoccur as to require action,5 this Court would have no difficulty modifying our rules to prevent such a reoccurrence. Instead, the majority simply adopts a rule that would retrospectively make impermissible what was, when it occurred, permissible under the court rules.
The underlying motivation of the Court’s decision, as implied by the majority’s opinion, is a belief that there was some “sharp practice” below. The majority, in essence, seems to be making a value judgment that defendant should not be allowed to withdraw his plea where the only reason for his doing so was the cunning of his counsel in not pointing out the district judge’s shortcomings. I would disagree with both portions of that judgment. As to the first part, as mentioned above, there is little doubt that, were defend*621ant allowed to withdraw his plea, the prosecution would have no difficulty obtaining a conviction on the basis of the police officer’s testimony and the blood alcohol evidence. While this might deprive the prosecutor of the ability to enhance defendant’s subsequent offense, the unfortunateness of that result must be weighed with the unfortunate results that will surely be engendered with the Court’s opinion today.
This Court has, along with the Court of Appeals, expended a considerable effort to delineate the lines between direct and collateral postconviction challenges. Today the Court endeavors to obscure those lines, and further suggests that our prior labors were simply pointless. The question of collateral versus direct challenges appears in contexts far more complex than the withdrawal of a guilty plea in a district court drunk driving case.
While no court wishes to see a just conviction vacated, it must be recalled that two things are true in this case: first, that the conviction was obtained by a plea that was woefully deficient and wholly unable to stand on its own, and, second, that, whatever our decision today, it is not suggested that there would be any serious impediments to the prosecutor obtaining a conviction on this charge were the plea to be withdrawn. Rather than recognize these facts, and the perhaps broad-reaching and thus far undetermined scope of its opinion today, the majority simply selects the easiest, albeit least supported, path toward a particular result.
The majority offers that what occurred in this case was a “transparent manipulation of the system,” fixating on defense counsel as the sole source of the problem, and stating a steadfast intent to prevent the har*622boring of an appellate “parachute.” Ante at 604. Addressing these concerns in reverse order, the very idea of harboring an “appellate parachute,” which is to say, failing to correct an obvious error where it can be efficiently corrected, can hardly be condoned. That does a disservice to the integrity of our appellate system. In the long run, however, as the effects of today’s decision come to pass, and as other appellate courts find themselves tempted to avoid difficult issues in a case simply by ruling that their occurrence should have been, and thus, in Orwellian logic, both is and was, impermissible, I would expect the integrity of our appellate system would suffer more from such reflexive and ill-considered endeavors than it would from being forced to endure a single trial of a single defendant, who, because of some substantial failings below, managed to locate a defect in our court rules.
The majority further attacks defense counsel for doing what is later described by way of quotation in its opinion as “lying in the weeds.” I find such criticism to be misplaced in the context of this case. It is without question that the district judge made serious errors. It is further without question that the prosecutor was not present and that the presence of even the most inexperienced prosecutor would likely to have been sufficient to prevent the difficulties that were encountered as a result of the plea-taking proceedings.6 Indeed, of all the participants in this matter and parties to this case, both present and not present, it appears that defense counsel was alone in adequately *623performing his role. If the weeds of Nydam7 did indeed exist in this case, they did so only because the trial judge planted them, and the prosecutor was nowhere to be found to trim them. Such failures, and the fear of such weeds, have led this Court to a hasty and ill-considered response, one likely to bring more havoc to the garden than the very weeds they feared. Accordingly, I dissent.
Kelly, J., concurred with Cavanagh, J.

 The defendant spoke only once, when asked if he had any comments before sentencing.

 The majority suggests that it is unaware of any court rule that requires “the prosecutor’s presence at misdemeanor arraignments where [the] defendant pleads guilty as charged.” Ante at 606, n 7.1 would agree, of course, that we have, thus far, enacted no such rule. Nonetheless, it would seem painfully obvious that the adversarial system of justice we utilize works best when there are, in fact, adversaries present. It is indisputable that, were the prosecutor present, and, presumably, sufficiently *616aware to be able to point out the deficiencies in the plea, countless time, effort, and judicial resources would have been spared, with the matter being corrected in the trial court, rather than on application for leave to this Court. Likewise, the failings of the district judge’s plea procedure in this case are so substantial as to require notice that, had the district court made any effort to comply with the court rules, this decision might not be necessary.

 The prosecutor’s brief to this Court reveals that defendant’s blood alcohol test showed a 0.24 percent blood alcohol level.

 The delay in this case was fourteen months.

 It is worth recalling, as previously detailed, the compilation of errors that was necessary for this case to find its way to this Court.

 Nonetheless, the majority has chosen not only to ignore this failing of the prosecution in favor of an attack on defense counsel, but to, in fact, implicitly condone it. Ante at 606, n 7.

 People v Nydam, 165 Mich App 476; 419 NW2d 417 (1987).