Court Opinion

ID: 9524730
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:56:34.64658+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:11:40.330838
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE O’ MALLEY, dissenting: In Gaines, this court stated that, unlike a postconviction petition filed under the Post-Conviction Hearing Act (725 ILCS 5/122 — 1 et seq. (West 2004)), “[a] section 2 — 1401 petition is akin to the complaint in a civil action, and to challenge the petition, the opponent must either move to dismiss it or file an answer.” Gaines, 335 Ill. App. 3d at 296. Once the implications of Gaines’ statement for section 2 — 1401 procedures are realized, it becomes clear that a trial court cannot sua sponte address the merits of a defendant’s section 2 — 1401 petition, as the trial court did here. If, as Gaines instructs, a section 2 — 1401 petition is akin to a civil complaint, then a motion to dismiss that attacks the petition as untimely is akin to a motion to dismiss under section 2 — 619 of the Code (735 ILCS 5/2 — 619 (West 2004)). Section 2 — 619(a)(5) provides in relevant part: “Defendant may, within the time for pleading, file a motion for dismissal of the action or for other appropriate relief upon any of the following grounds. If the grounds do not appear on the face of the pleading attacked the motion shall be supported by affidavit: $ (5) That the action was not commenced within the time limited by law.” 735 ILCS 5/2 — 619(a)(5) (West 2004). Section 2 — 619 allows for a dismissal under different theories from section 2 — 615 of the Code (735 ILCS 5/2 — 615 (West 2004)). A section 2 — 615 motion attacks the legal sufficiency of the plaintiffs claims, while a section 2 — 619 motion admits the legal sufficiency of the claims but raises defects, defenses, or other affirmative matter, appearing on the face of the complaint or established by external submissions, that defeat the action. Northern Trust Co. v. County of Lake, 353 Ill. App. 3d 268, 278 (2004). “ ‘Motions made pursuant to section 2 — 619 of the Code must be limited to the grounds enumerated therein. [Citations.] Failure to state a cause of action is not such an enumerated ground, but is instead a basis for a section 2 — 615 motion.’ ” AG Farms, Inc. v. American Premier Underwriters, Inc., 296 Ill. App. 3d 684, 688 (1998), quoting Universal Underwriters Insurance Co. ex. rel Manley Ford, Inc. v. Long, 215 Ill. App. 3d 396, 399 (1991). Confusing a section 2 — 615 motion to dismiss with a section 2 — 619 motion to dismiss may have “severe” consequences and “should not be countenanced” by trial judges. Rowan v. Novotny, 157 Ill. App. 3d 691, 693 (1987). In Rowan, the defendant filed a motion to dismiss, purportedly under section 2 — 619, which raised several contentions, among them that the plaintiff failed to state a cause of action. The trial court granted the motion to dismiss without specifying any reasons for the dismissal or citing the specific statutory section under which the dismissal was made. On appeal, the defendant defended the dismissal by arguing that the plaintiffs complaint failed to state a cause of action. The appellate court held that this argument was never properly before the trial court because it was “not [an] argument[ ] to be advanced through a section 2 — 619 motion but rather through a section 2 — 615 motion.” Rowan, 157 Ill. App. 3d at 694. The court explained: “It would be improper and unjust to allow the defendant to attack the complaint after failing to file a proper motion pointing out specifically the defects complained as required by [section 2 — 615] because the purpose of the statute is to give the plaintiff an opportunity to respond to the objection and to cure the defect in the trial court.” Rowan, 157 Ill. App. 3d at 694. Given the parallels between a motion to dismiss a civil complaint under section 2 — 619 and a motion to dismiss a section 2 — 1401 petition not on the merits of the petition but only on an affirmative matter such as timeliness, the impropriety of the trial court’s procedure here is clear. Defendant, faced with a motion to dismiss that raised only timeliness issues, had a right to expect that the merits of his claim would not be addressed at the hearing on that motion to dismiss, just as a plaintiff in a civil action would not expect the trial court to raise issues about the legal sufficiency of his claims in addressing a section 2 — 619 motion to dismiss. The trial court, I conclude, erred in reaching the substance of defendant’s petition. The majority does not acknowledge my points here but rules against defendant largely by finding his claims procedurally defaulted. The majority applies notions of “waiver” and “acquiescence” but not persuasively. First, the majority suggests, rather strangely, that defendant’s argument “is based upon the faulty premise that the trial court dismissed his petition” rather than “conducted a simultaneous hearing on both the State’s motion to dismiss and [his] *** petition,” and that I have bought into defendant’s erroneous assumption by accepting his argument. 368 Ill. App. 3d at 683. The majority proceeds to find that, because defendant has not 'attacked the legitimacy of that “simultaneous hearing,” he has waived any challenge to that hearing. 368 Ill. App. 3d at 683. The majority’s claim bewilders me. I do not know why defendant would be arguing, and I agreeing, that the trial court erred in reaching the merits of his petition unless we both believed that the trial court actually reached the merits of his petition through a “simultaneous hearing” and then rejected those merits. The “faulty premise” I see at work here is the majority’s belief that defendant has not argued on appeal that the trial court erred in reaching the merits of his petition. Second, the majority finds waiver for the additional reason that defendant failed to object in the trial court to the simultaneous hearing. I do not share the majority’s comfort with using waiver to defeat the claims of a pro se criminal defendant under section 2 — 1401, particularly where, as here, the State has not argued waiver and the defendant’s arguments on appeal implicate rights that we so zealously defended in Gaines and Pearson. The majority alternatively finds that defendant acquiesced in the simultaneous hearing by declining the opportunity given him by the trial court to present any additional matter on the petition before the trial court ruled on it. Even if (as I dispute) the trial court had authority to address sua sponte the merits of defendant’s petition, the procedure employed by the trial court still was deficient. What the trial court in essence did was (using the Gaines analogy again) invoke section 2 — 615 on its own initiative to dismiss defendant’s petition. A section 2 — 615 motion “shall point out specifically the defects complained of.” 735 ILCS 5/2 — 615(a) (West 2004). The trial court did not identify any defects in defendant’s petition before asking if he wanted to add anything regarding the petition. The trial court did, of course, subsequently identify several defects in the petition, but the court proceeded to dismiss the petition without affording defendant an opportunity to address the alleged deficiencies. The trial court’s unsolicited venture into the merits of defendant’s petition no more complied with section 2 — 615 than would a procedure in which the State filed a motion, purportedly under section 2 — 615, that made no assertions but simply asked defendant if he had anything to add to his petition and the trial court immediately granted the motion, with or without any stated reasons, and provided defendant no opportunity to respond.1  The majority asserts that “it is permissible for a petitioner to waive any obligation a respondent may have to file an answer to a section 2 — 1401 petition,” and cites as authority Dealer Management Systems. 368 Ill. App. 3d at 684. Dealer Management Systems, however, does not state any such general rule, and its facts, which the majority neglects even to mention, are unlike what occurred here. In Dealer Management Systems, the plaintiff filed a section 2 — 1401 petition seeking to vacate the dismissal of his complaint. The plaintiff set the petition for a hearing on a particular day. The defendant neither answered the petition nor moved to strike it. On the day set for the hearing, the trial court entered an order denying the petition. The plaintiff appealed, arguing that, because the defendant failed to answer the petition or move to strike it, its allegations must be taken as true. We disagreed, noting that our supreme court rules state that a party served with a section 2 — 1401 petition is entitled to notice that it must answer or otherwise respond to the petition within 30 days after service of the petition. Dealer Management Systems, 355 Ill. App. 3d at 419. We noted that, because the record did not indicate when the plaintiff served the petition, we could not determine whether the defendant’s time to answer had expired when the trial court denied the petition. We also observed that the notice served by the plaintiff did not inform the defendant that it was required to respond to the petition. We concluded that the plaintiff waived the requirement that the defendant answer or otherwise respond to the petition. Dealer Management Systems, 355. Ill. App. 3d at 419. I fail to see any relevant similarities between Dealer Management Systems and the present case. Defendant does not suggest that this court should take the allegations of his petition as true; rather, he argues that the trial court had no authority to reach the merits of his claims given the scope of the State’s challenge. There is also no suggestion that defendant failed to comply with the rules pertaining to the service of a section 2 — 1401 petition, a breach of which was the basis for the finding of waiver in Dealer Management Systems. Not only is Dealer Management Systems factually distinguishable, but the case gives no rule by which waiver might be applied in contexts different than its own. Rather than dispense with defendant’s claims on dubious grounds of procedural default, the majority ought to reach the vital issue that begs for resolution: whether the trial court’s action was consistent with the civil complaint/section 2 — 1401 analogy that drove our decisions in Pearson and Gaines. I should also note that a harmless-error analysis is not applicable here. In Pearson we refused to apply a harmless-error analysis, because the trial court’s summary dismissal of the defendant’s section 2 — 1401 petition was “a fundamentally incorrect form of proceeding.” Pearson, 345 Ill. App. 3d at 196. We explained: “[W]e can conduct harmless-error analysis only by examining fundamentally proper proceedings and considering whether, if we removed the effect of an error, we would obtain the same result. Where the error is that the proceedings were of fundamentally the wrong kind, we cannot speculatively recreate the right proceedings to determine what should have been the result. A section 2 — 1401 petition invokes an adversarial proceeding brought under the Code. Despite the predictability of the ultimate dismissal of this petition, we think that the procedure by which the trial court dismissed it was simply too far removed from what defendant was entitled to for us to review the matter as if defendant had been given notice and an opportunity to answer.” Pearson, 345 Ill. App. 3d at 196. Because the dismissal of defendant’s petition in the present case was based on an error analogous to confusing a section 2 — 615 motion to dismiss with a section 2 — 619 motion to dismiss, the dismissal was “a fundamentally incorrect form of proceeding” to which harmless-error analysis does not apply.  It might be argued that the trial court could have cured any prejudice to defendant in the handling of his petition by allowing him to amend the petition to cure the defects identified by the court. The record does not show whether the dismissal of the petition was with prejudice. However, the trial court’s stance toward a potential amendment may be reflected in the fact that it informed defendant of his appellate rights immediately after announcing the dismissal of the petition.