Court Opinion

ID: 9523095
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:36:02.536245+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:04:33.615261
License: Public Domain

Armstrong,],
(dissenting). In Bordenkircher v. Hayes, 434 U.S. 357 (1978), the Supreme Court rejected a contention that the principle of North Carolina v. Pearce, 395 U.S. 711 (1969), should be extended into the area of plea negotiation. It drew a distinction between a defendant’s right to appeal from a conviction, which was involved in the Pearce case and in Blackledge v. Perry, 417 U.S. 21 (1974), and the defendant’s right to insist on trial, which the Supreme Court had recently (see Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. 742 [1970]) held could be burdened by the possibility of a more onerous sentence. “Whatever might be the situation in an ideal world, the fact is that the guilty plea and the often concomitant plea bargain are important components of this country’s criminal justice system.” Bordenkircher at 361-362, quoting from Blackledge v. Allison, 431 U.S. 63, 71 (1977). “While confronting a defendant with the risk of more severe punishment clearly may have a ‘discouraging effect on the defendant’s assertion of his trial rights, the imposition of those difficult choices [is] an inevitable’ — and permissible — ‘attribute of any legitimate system which tolerates and encourages the negotiation of pleas.’ Chaffin *138v. Stynchcombe, [412 U.S. 17, 31 (1979)] .... [T]his Court has necessarily accepted as constitutionally legitimate the simple reality that the prosecutor’s interest at the bargaining table is to persuade the defendant to forgo his right to plead not guilty.” Id. at 364. In light of the Bordenkircher decision, the majority seems to me to be on unsound ground in applying the principles of North Carolina v. Pearce and Blackledge v. Perry to a sentencing recommendation proposed by a prosecutor in the process of plea negotiation.
The majority seem to treat as pivotal the fact that the prosecutor changed his position as to the sentence he would recommend if the defendant insisted on going to trial.1 But *139the Bordenkircher case also involved a change of position by the prosecution;2 the Supreme Court nevertheless held that the principle of North Carolina v. Pearce had no application because the change of position occurred in the context of plea negotiation. It is settled, of course, that the prosecutor may not renege on his promise after the defendant has pleaded guilty in reliance on it. Santobello v. New York, 404 U.S. 257 (1971). But neither case law nor principles of contract or equity bind the prosecutor before that time. It is a one-sided negotiation indeed, where the defendant is at *140liberty to change his position at any time before making his plea, but each position taken by the prosecutor represents an irrevocable concession to the defendant. The all-but-inevitable practical result of such a rule would be that the prosecutor will put a harsh alternative to the defendant at the outset and will not soften that position significantly; in consequence, fewer plea bargains will be struck, more cases will be tried, and defendants who plead guilty under the law as it now stands will be deprived of the benefits of the plea bargaining system and will tend to receive more severe sentences. See Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. at 752.3 Plea bargaining would doubtless have no place in an ideal criminal justice system; but the Brady and Bordenkircher cases acknowledge the dependence of our present system on free and frank plea negotiation; and the latter seems to me to be a square holding that the principles of North Carolina v. Pearce and Blackledge v. Perry have no application to the plea negotiation process.
There is further reason that the judge’s decision should not be disturbed. The defendant’s motion, which was, in effect, a motion for a new trial, raised nothing that was not fully known to the defendant and his counsel at the time the defendant entered his guilty plea. See Smith, Criminal Practice and Procedure §§ 1087, 1088 (1970). It is well settled that a defendant “may not waive or terminate a trial by pleading guilty, sample the penalty and then elect to litigate preexisting nonjurisdictional legal questions.” Commonwealth v. Zion, 359 Mass. 559, 563 (1971). “When a criminal defendant has solemnly admitted in open court that he is in fact guilty of the offense with which he is charged, he may not thereafter raise independent claims relating to the deprivation of constitutional rights that occurred prior to the entry of the guilty plea. He may only attack the voluntary and intelligent character of the guilty *141plea by showing that the advice he received from counsel was not within the standards set forth in [McMann v. Richardson, 397 U.S. 759 (1970)].” Tollett v. Henderson, 411 U.S. 258, 267 (1973).4 “Voluntary”, in this context, does not mean free from the influence of a potentially more severe sentence recommendation if the defendant should elect to go to trial, Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. at 751; and nothing more coercive than that is alleged or proven in the instant case.
I would affirm the action of the judge in refusing to set aside the defendant’s guilty pleas.

 Unless the change of position is justified by new information coming to the attention of the prosecutor after the original proposal for a sentence recommendation, the majority seem to hold that the change is prompted by “vindictiveness” as matter of law, thus fitting the case into the operative rubric of North Carolina v. Pearce and eliminating the need for an inquiry into the prosecutor’s actual motives. Doubtless a trial judge may and should permit a defendant to withdraw a guilty plea which was induced by unfair, vindictive, or unconscionable behavior by a prosecutor, but the record before us shows none of these. The prosecutor explained to the judge (this being the explanation from which the majority infer “vindictiveness” in the artificial sense in which they employ the word) that he had offered the three-year recommendation despite the consensus in his office that the defendant should be given four years of in-prison time, that his proposed recommendation was based on an erroneous surmise that the defendant has no thought of contesting his guilt and that he was genuinely conscience-stricken; that when the defendant indicated he might go to trial and filed what the prosecutor thought to be dilatory motions, the prosecutor “felt in good conscience that the original recommendation in this case was not a fair one”; that based on “the consideration of the [defendant's attitude, that given a substantial prior record, the large number of offenses still facing him, the probation violation that was still facing him, the fact that in the past he has served as many as ten months already in jail, I felt that the recommendation was really too lenient. I communicated all that information to [the defendant’s counsel] on May 11th of 1979. I have notes to that effect. I communicated that to him as soon thereafter as I felt that in my good conscience I could not stick with that recommendation, your Honor. I communicated that to him forthrightly, openly, honestly and expeditiously. That communication was made on May 11, 1979. I’d suggest that there could be no substantial reliance whatsoever on the fact of that original recommendation; that the [defendant was privy to that information for ten days prior to that time that we walked into this courtroom two days ago.”

 Both the Bordenkircher case and Blackledge v. Perry involved a change in the charges returned against the defendant. In Perry a more severe charge was brought after the defendant had been found guilty of a lesser charge in a District Court and had taken an appeal to a Superior Court where he would obtain a trial de novo; it was held that North Carolina v. Pearce precluded the bringing of the more severe charges, that such action impermissibly burdened the defendant’s statutory right to appeal. In the Bordenkircher case the prosecutor told the defendant that if he did not plead guilty to the pending charge the prosecutor would cause more severe charges to be brought; the prosecutor later carried out the threat. The Court of Appeals, relying on North Carolina v. Pearce, held in a decision reasoned strikingly like the majority’s decision in the present case that “[w]hen a prosecutor obtains an indictment less severe than the facts known to him at the time might permit, he makes a discretionary determination that the interests of the state are served by not seeking more serious charges .... Accordingly, if after plea negotiations fail, he then procures an indictment charging a more serious crime, a strong inference is created that the only reason for the more serious charges is vindictiveness. Under these circumstances, the prosecutor should be required to justify his action.” Hayes v. Cowan, 547 F.2d 42, 44-45 (6th Cir. 1976), quoted in the Bordenkircher opinion, 434 U.S. at 361 n.6. The Supreme Court reversed, holding North Carolina v. Pearce and Blackledge v. Perry inapplicable. “In those cases the Court was dealing with the State’s unilateral imposition of a penalty upon a defendant who had chosen to exercise a legal right to attack his original conviction — a situation ‘very different from the give-and-take negotiation common in plea bargaining between the prosecution and defense, which arguably possess relatively equal bargaining power.” Bordenkircher at 362, quoting from Parker v. North Carolina, 397 U.S. 790, 809 (1970) (opinion of Brennan, J.). The opinion of the majority in the present case goes further in restricting the prosecutor’s discretion than did the Court of Appeals decision which was overturned in the Bordenkircher case, binding the prosecutor not only to a position formally taken by the bringing of the charge but also to a sentencing position informally taken at an early stage of plea negotiation.

 Correspondingly, it must be conceded, some of those who plead guilty under the present system will, as a result of being forced to trial, be acquitted.

 The Supreme Court has recognized one exception to that rule, but it is inapplicable here. That is where “ [t]he very initiation of the proceedings against [the defendant] in the Superior Court . . . operated to deny him due process of law,” Blackledge v. Perry, 417 U.S. at 30-31. In that case (see note 2, supra) the prosecutor, following the defendant’s appeal to a superior court from his misdemeanor conviction at the District Court level, secured a felony indictment based on the same facts.