Court Opinion

ID: 9728417
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 14:07:23.091108+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:48.483415
License: Public Domain

NIGRO, Justice,
concurring.
I agree with the majority that under the facts of the instant case, Appellant is precluded from obtaining PCRA relief pursuant to the one-year filing limitation. I write separately, however, because I believe that equity would have required a different result had the facts established that Appellant reasonably relied in good faith upon counsel to protect his appellate rights.
While I acknowledge that the purpose of the one-year filing limitation is to establish finality and prevent the repetitive filing of meritless PCRA petitions, I also believe that the PCRA is designed to protect a defendant who reasonably relies in good faith upon counsel to protect his appellate rights, but counsel nevertheless allows those rights to be forfeited. I am troubled by the prospect that a defendant who, for example, instructed counsel to file a direct appeal, was told by counsel that an appeal was being filed, was subsequently reassured by counsel that the appeal was filed, but later found out after the one-year limitation period expired that counsel never filed the appeal, is forever precluded from receiving at least one appellate review of his case. In my view, a rule that penalizes a defendant who reasonably relies in good faith upon his counsel to protect his appellate rights is contrary to the purpose of the PCRA, and such a defendant *101should be entitled to, at a bare minimum, one appellate review.1

. In the instant case, the trial court, granted nunc pro tunc relief based upon the fact that Appellant sought a timely appeal. Although the record reveals that Appellant told both his trial counsel and the public defender after trial to file an appeal, there is no evidence that Appellant was ever told that an appeal was, or even would be, filed. The record also reveals that Appellant waited for twenty months after his judgment of sentence became final before seeking nunc pro tunc relief. I do not believe that merely telling counsel to file an appeal, without more, is sufficient to establish that Appellant had a good laith, reasonable basis to conclude that counsel was protecting his appellate rights when Appellant failed to follow up on his request for an appeal for twenty months after judgment of sentence.