Court Opinion

ID: 9532840
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 04:25:21.055876+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:28:51.201534
License: Public Domain

Pigott, J. (dissenting).
I respectfully dissent and would affirm the order of the Appellate Division. A grand jury charged defendant in a 32-count indictment with raping, sodomizing, and sexually abusing his daughter. A jury trial commenced on April 22, 2002, at which defendant’s daughter, then 16, was the first to testify. She recounted for the jury in detail over several hours how defendant raped and abused her over a six-year period, beginning in 1994, when she was nine years old. Following the daughter’s direct-examination testimony, defendant informed the court that he wished to plead guilty to the top count of the indictment, first-degree rape, in full satisfaction of the charges. Defendant admitted that his daughter’s direct-examination testimony was true, and specifically, that he had forced her to have sex with him since she was nine years old. The court accepted defendant’s plea and informed him that he would serve a prison sentence of 15 years. It is undisputed that no mention was made of any mandatory postrelease supervision. At sentencing, the court imposed the negotiated 15-year prison sentence.
In March 2004, approximately two years later, defendant challenged his judgment of conviction, arguing that his plea was involuntary because he had not been informed that his prison sentence carried a five-year period of postrelease supervision. *194Following proceedings before Supreme Court, defendant’s sentence was modified to a term of I2V2 years in prison and 2Va years of postrelease supervision. The Appellate Division, with two Justices dissenting, affirmed defendant’s modified sentence.
This Court has consistently held that a court’s “failure or inability to fulfill a [sentencing] promise requires either that the plea of guilty be vacated or the promise fulfilled, but there is no indicated preference for one course over the other. The choice rests in the discretion of the sentencing court” (People v Selikoff, 35 NY2d 227, 239 [1974], cert denied 419 US 1122 [1975]). Indeed, a trial court may have good reason to choose specific performance over a defendant’s request to withdraw his plea. For instance, when years have passed since the original plea, making it difficult for the People to proceed to trial, allowing vacatur of the plea would afford the defendant “more than he [is] entitled” (id. at 240). For that reason, “the State can hold a defendant to an agreed sentence rather than allow vacat[ur] of the plea when it would otherwise be prejudiced” (People v McConnell, 49 NY2d 340, 349 [1980]; see People v Esposito, 32 NY2d 921, 923 [1973]).
Contrary to the majority’s position, I find nothing in our prior precedent that requires a vacatur of defendant’s plea as the only possible remedy for the Catu error. In People v Catu (4 NY3d 242 [2005]) and People v Van Deusen (7 NY3d 744 [2006]), specific performance was not a viable option, so this Court had no occasion to address the issue. In that regard, in Catu, defendant pleaded guilty in exchange for the statutory minimum sentence (4 NY3d at 244). Because defendant had already received the minimum sentence, vacatur of the defendant’s plea was the only possible remedy for the error. In Van Deusen, the defendant was misinformed about the possible sentencing range; she believed that the range was not less than five years or no more than 15 years in prison (7 NY3d at 745). The court modified the sentence to eight years’ imprisonment and five years of postrelease supervision, but that sentence was more than the least amount of incarceration time she could have hoped to get at the time of her plea (id.). Thus, it could not be said with assurance in Van Deusen that the defendant got the full benefit of her plea bargain. Similarly, in People v Louree (8 NY3d 541 [2007]), the sole issue before this Court was whether the defendant was required to preserve for appellate review his complaint of the Catu error.
Here, the trial court chose the remedy of specific performance, which in my view, it had the authority to do. At the time of his *195plea, defendant was promised a sentence of 15 years in prison. After the trial court’s modification, defendant received the full benefit of his bargain, plus a windfall. Thus, unlike in Catu and Van Deusen, the modified sentence comported with the understanding and expectations of defendant at the time of his guilty plea. Finally, the trial court here had good reason to choose the remedy of specific performance over vacatur of the plea. Specifically, the People would be severely prejudiced if defendant’s daughter was subjected to testifying once again at a new trial after several years have passed.
Judges Ciparick, Graffeo and Jones concur with Chief Judge Kaye; Judge Pigott dissents and votes to affirm in a separate opinion in which Judges Read and Smith concur.
Order reversed, etc.