Court Opinion

ID: 9741836
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:02:53.031161+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:26.645705
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE CLARK, specially concurring: I concur because I agree with the court that mere allegations of the defendant’s subjective confusion or lack of understanding will not suffice to afford him an evidentiary hearing on the issue of whether he voluntarily pled guüty. But, as in other instances (see, e.g., People v. Free (1988), 122 Ill. 2d 367 (Clark, J., dissenting)), I cannot agree with the court’s strict application of the waiver doctrine in death penalty cases. The arguments I made in Free apply a fortiorari to the application of the Rule 604(d) (107 Ill. 2d R. 604(d)) waiver rule in death penalty cases. A plea of guilty in a capital case is simply not the same as a guilty plea in any other kind of case. The capital defendant who pleads guilty does not waive merely his right to put the prosecution to its proof. He also takes the first irrevocable step down the slope which may lead to his death. The people of Illinois need the assurance that he has taken that step with his eyes open. We cannot, therefore, absolutely condition post-conviction relief in a death penalty case on the presence of a Rule 604(d) motion. If the defendant’s plea was truly involuntary, it is at least possible that whatever caused the involuntariness has also prevented the defendant from knowingly waiving his right to file a Rule 604(d) motion. This is particularly true where the involuntariness claim is related to a claim of incompetence of counsel. Under these circumstances, we cannot take the risk of putting a defendant to death merely because his counsel failed to file a piece of paper. I am aware, of course, that there is another danger: a clever defendant may choose to delay execution by first pleading guilty and then later claiming that his plea was involuntary. To prevent this kind of sandbagging, I would not hesitate to use the presence or absence of a Rule 604(d) motion as one factor in considering whether a defendant was entitled to an evidentiary hearing. But using Rule 604(d) as a factor is one thing; making it an absolute bar is something else. Since I cannot agree with this approach, I specially concur.