Court Opinion

ID: 9457508
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 20:24:02.67797+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:22.939491
License: Public Domain

WILKEY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
I respectfully disagree with the conclusion of my colleagues. Here the court vacates a 1954 conviction for obtaining marijuana without having paid the transfer tax, a conviction based on appellant’s plea of guilty, because of the subsequent decisions of the Supreme Court in Leary v. United States1 and United States v. Covington.2 The court does this on the authority of United States v. Liguori.3
Try as I may, I cannot reach any conclusion other than that the decision and language of the Supreme Court in Brady v. United States 4 is dispositive of Broad-us’ case here.
In Brady the Court reiterated the twofold test that “guilty pleas are valid if both ‘voluntary’ and ‘intelligent,’ ” 5 and held that Brady’s plea was both voluntary and intelligently made, even though nine years later the Court’s decision in United States v. Jackson6 rendered his lawyer’s advice erroneous. In Liguori *642the Second Circuit found no claim of involuntariness by Liguori but apparently rested its decision on the premise that his plea was not intelligently made, saying:
* * * [W]e consider here whether Liguori when he pleaded guilty intended to waive his defense under Leary even before that decision was rendered. We think that he did not.7
With all due deference to my two colleagues and the three judges of the Second Circuit, I deem this holding directly contrary to Brady. For in Brady, after citing the long-established two-point standard of voluntary and intelligent pleas of guilty, the Supreme Court said:
The rule that a plea must be intelligently made to be valid does not require that a plea be vulnerable to later attack if the defendant did not correctly assess every relevant factor entering into his decision. A defendant is not entitled to withdraw his plea merely because he discovers long after the plea has been accepted that his calculus misapprehended the quality of the State’s case or the likely penalties attached to alternative courses of action. More particularly, absent misrepresentation or other impermissible conduct by state agents, cf. Von Moltke v. Gillies, 332 U.S. 708, 68 S.Ct. 316, 92 L.Ed. 309 (1948), a voluntary plea of guilty intelligently made in the light of the then applicable law does not become vulnerable because later judicial decisions indicate that the plea rested on a faulty premise. * * *
The fact that Brady did not anticipate United States v. Jackson, supra, does not impugn the truth or reliability of his plea. * * *8
I submit that the fact that Broadus did not anticipate the 15-year-later decisions in Leary and Covington does not impugn the truth or reliability of Broadus’ plea of guilty to the marijuana offense. I do not think that the issue here (or in Li-guori) is “whether [Broadus] when he pleaded guilty intended to waive his defense under Leary even before that decision was rendered.” I think the issue is, as the Supreme Court plainly said in Brady, whether Broadus’ plea of guilty was intelligently made at the time (1954) when he made it. There is no evidence that it was not.
I would reach the same decision the Supreme Court did in Brady. I would affirm the District Court’s denial of relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2255.

. 395 U.S. 6, 89 S.Ct. 1532, 23 L.Ed.2d 57 (1969).

. 395 U.S. 57, 89 S.Ct. 1559, 23 L.Ed.2d 94 (1969).

. 430 F.2d 842 (2d Cir. 1970) cert, denied, 402 U.S. 948, 91 S.Ct. 1614, 29 L.Ed.2d 118 (1971).

. 397 U.S. 742, 90 S.Ct. 1463, 25 L.Ed.2d 747 (1970), and companion cases, McMann v. Richardson, 397 U.S. 759, 90 S.Ct. 1441, 25 L.Ed.2d 763 (1970), and Parker v. North Carolina, 397 U.S. 790, 90 S.Ct. 1458, 25 L.Ed.2d 785 (1970).

. Id., 397 U.S. at 747, 90 S.Ct., at 1468.

. 390 U.S. 570, 88 S.Ct. 1209, 20 L.Ed.2d 138 (1968).

. 430 F.2d, at 849.

. 397 U.S., at 757, 90 S.Ct., at 1473 (emphasis supplied).