Court Opinion

ID: 9766412
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:47:36.359041+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:22.311495
License: Public Domain

*641Morse, J.,
concurring. I agree that this case should be remanded so that defendant can withdraw his nolo contendere plea, but I reach this result by a different route and therefore concur separately.
By entering an Alford plea to lewd and lascivious conduct, defendant unequivocally expressed his desire to refrain from admitting he was a sexual offender. Had the condition that he attend sex-offender group therapy (requiring an admission of guilt to the offense) been imposed at the time of the plea, the fact that the plea and the condition did not mesh would have become instantly apparent. Instead, defendant agreed to an open-ended boilerplate condition that he “participate fully in any program to which [he] may be referred by the Court or [his] probation officer.”
Condition eight neither expressly included nor excluded the possibility of sex-offender therapy. Thus, the provision had a latent ambiguity. On its face, it says defendant may be ordered into “any program,” but the context of the agreement — against the background of defendant’s Alford plea — surely assumes an exception for programs that require admissions of guilt. The problem should have been apparent to the trial court and parties from the beginning, because it is well known that any therapy treatment begins with reeognition of the problem, in this ease, an admission of guilt.
Instead, the Court attributes to defendant any failure to anticipate this inconsistency. Defendant’s interpretation of the condition is at least as reasonable — and, in the context of the Alford plea, more reasonable— than the State’s. I think what happened here is best described as a basic misunderstanding between the parties. The problem occurred, not when defendant was ordered into sex offender therapy, but at the making of the plea agreement and the imposition of boilerplate condition eight.
A misunderstanding in the making of the contract can be so basic that no contract is actually made. See Restatement of Contracts (Second) § 20, at 58-59 (1981), and comments b and c, at 59-60 (there is no mutual assent to create a contract when the parties reasonably attach materially different meanings to an essential term of the agreement and neither party knows the other party’s meaning); Konic International Corp. v. Spokane Computer Services, Inc., 708 P.2d 932, 935 (Idaho Ct. App. 1985) (no contract exists where misunderstanding between parties is “so basic and so material that any agreement the parties thought they had reached was merely an illusion”). Consequently, I believe rescission of the plea agreement is the appropriate remedy.