Court Opinion

ID: 9472008
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:46:45.593857+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:41.621189
License: Public Domain

HAYNSWORTH, Senior Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I would affirm this judgment.
The lawyer himself testified that he had told Little that he thought Little might receive a sentence “somewhere between twenty and thirty years,” a prediction which turned out to be quite accurate. He also testified that he told Little that he would be eligible for parole “when you serve one-fifth of your maximum sentence.” (emphasis supplied). In combination, those statements by his lawyer seem to me fully to justify Little’s claim that his expectation was that he would be eligible for parole in five years.
I do not think Little’s answers to the inquiries made at the time of sentencing foreclose the present claim. He then had no reason to think that he had been misad-vised or misled. Nor did he have reason to be dissatisfied with his lawyer’s performance. The reason for his dissatisfaction arose later when he found that he would be required to serve fifteen to twenty years before becoming eligible for parole.
This is not a case in which the lawyer’s prediction of the range of sentencing was far from the mark. The lawyer’s prediction here that the sentence would be somewhere between twenty and thirty years was substantially realized when the twenty-five to thirty year sentence was imposed upon Little. Little was not misled because the sentence imposed by the judge was harsher than the one predicted. Little was grossly misled by the lawyer’s representation that Little would become eligible for parole after service of one-fifth of “your maximum sentence.” Applied to the lawyer’s prediction of a sentence somewhere between twenty and thirty years, the lawyer’s representation, not prediction, was that, under the law, Little would become eligible for parole in four to six years if the sentence actually imposed was within the range the lawyer predicted. The advice was patently and flagrantly wrong since, under the law, parole eligibility must be computed on the basis of the statutory maximum sentence for second degree murder, which is life imprisonment. To Little, there is all the difference in the world between a sentence with a parole eligibility of four to six years and one with a basic parole eligibility of twenty years.
I conclude that Little was grossly misled just as the petitioners were in Strader v. Garrison, 611 F.2d 61 (4th Cir.1979), and *243O’Tuel v. Osborne, 706 F.2d 498 (4th Cir. 1983).
For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.