Court Opinion

ID: 9858386
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 16:21:21.710682+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:54:05.043292
License: Public Domain

HARRIS, Justice
(dissenting).
I cannot believe the trial court can be charged with giving defendant any hope, glimmering or otherwise, that he might escape serving the maximum sentence. During the guilty plea proceeding, and before the plea was entered, the court told defendant:
I would not want you to plead guilty based on the assumption the court was going to do anything, particularly, by way of sentencing, other than the maximum penalty which I have outlined.
The majority remands the case because of remarks of the trial court in ordering a presentence investigation:
I intend to order a presentence investigation from the department of court services in this case. I will be guided quite a bit by that. When the time for sentencing arrives, I will consider what the county attorney says, if anything, and what your attorney says and then arrive at what I think is the proper sentence... .
The trial court, however, took great pains to keep defendant from harboring any hopes about the sentence. After the comments which the majority complains about, the trial court went on:
But you understand you are not pleading guilty because you think the court will do or not do some other thing. Do you understand that?
THE DEFENDANT: Yes.
THE COURT: Have there been any threats or promises made to you at all to get you to plead guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: No.
THE COURT: No predictions made as to what the court’s sentence is likely to be, that is, other than the maximum penalty which I have explained to you. Do you understand that?
THE DEFENDANT: Yes.
A month later defendant was sentenced by a different judge. The second judge stated:
*319Mr. West, on August 18 of this year you entered a plea of guilty to this court to the charge of robbery in the second degree in violation of the Code of Iowa. [This] class C felony ... is a forcible felony, and the court has no option under law but to make the sentence that is about to be passed upon you.
We of course do not know whether defendant had been previously told by his lawyer that the sentence was mandatory. We do know that, having been told in court that it was, he did not immediately move before sentence to withdraw his plea. See Iowa R.Crim.P. 8(2)(a). The trial court then pronounced sentence: “Accordingly, you are sentenced to an indeterminate time not to exceed ten years in an institution to be chosen by administrative authorities of the State.”
Once again I feel obliged to protest the triumph of form over substance. See State v. Fluhr, 287 N.W.2d 857, 869-70 (Iowa 1980) (dissenting opinion); State v. Reaves, 254 N.W.2d 488, 492 (Iowa 1977). We have come far. Notwithstanding our later retreat, see State v. Griffin, 238 N.W.2d 780, 781 (Iowa 1976), we at one time believed that a defendant should, at the very least, be required to claim innocence in order to set aside a guilty plea. State v. Whitehead, 163 N.W.2d 899, 903 (Iowa 1969).
Defendant’s position is not appreciably different here because of what the judge said about the presentence investigation. Would the majority find a glimmering but false hope if the presentence report had been merely ordered, without further comment? Would there have been a trace of a glimmer if the judge had expressed doubt of his authority to suspend or defer sentence but would order a presentence investigation and study the matter?
Surely, in the absence of some claim of innocence, we should trust the lawyer, furnished so often by the taxpayers, to advise the accused on the law and trust the judge, within the statutory framework, to set and pronounce sentence. As it is, with each addition to the prescribed litany, we increase the likelihood that a claim will be made that a judge gave some lawyer’s client the wrong legal advice.
The defendant here was in no way harmed by the ordering of a presentence investigation. On the whole record I cannot believe he was misled by what the judge said when ordering it. I agree with the majority’s conclusions in division II and would affirm.
McGIVERIN, J., joins this dissent.