Court Opinion

ID: 9454663
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:53:52.65173+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:13.602274
License: Public Domain

ALBERT V. BRYAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
A convict’s prescription for defeat of consecutive sentences is, unwittingly, accepted in today’s opinion. Readily pur-suable, the design is this. Reversal of a subsequent sentence is not pressed until after the prisoner has served an earlier one. By then, through lapse of time, the State’s evidence to refute the attack on the conviction or for a retrial will in all probability be unavailable. The pattern is exquisitely demonstrated here.
Turner was sentenced to serve 10 years in 1955 on a plea of guilty. In May 1956, after a plea of not guilty, he was sentenced to imprisonment for 5 years, to begin upon the expiration of the 1955 sentence. In November 1956, convicted of manslaughter on a not guilty plea, he was ordered imprisoned from 4 to 8 years, commencing at the end of the May 1956 sentence. Thus within two years he had accumulated sentences of 19 years or more. The November 1956 or last sentence is the one questioned now.
The ground of impeachment is that his appeal from the November 1956 conviction, although noted, was never perfected. For almost 10 years — until early 1966 — Turner voiced no complaint of the omission. Of course, he lost nothing by waiting, for meanwhile he was receiving credit on the prior sentences. Moreover, as the inception of service of the November 1956 sentence would not arrive until 1968, when urging his grievance he had not been detained for a single day under it. Notwithstanding, he now wins release from it unless North Carolina can remake its case after an in*491terval of 9 or 10 years. The reporter’s notes of the trial have been destroyed, and presumably the witnesses are not procurable, or if so, their memories have dimmed. Certainly a doubt is created whether a retrial is possible.
True, on termination of the November 1956 trial, at the instance of Turner, his counsel noticed an appeal. He also visited him while in custody after the verdict, and talked about the appeal. Counsel’s testimony is not without inconsistency, and admittedly he may not have been as diligent as he ought to have been. But the point is that Turner obviously acquiesced in abandonment of the prosecution of the appeal. Thereafter Turner made no inquiry whatsoever of his lawyer about its status. Frequent opportunities were afforded Turner to assert his desire for an appeal. He was paroled on January 16, 1962, and remained at liberty until the release was revoked on June 5, 1962. In 1963 he was freed on parole again on February 1 and remained so until this privilege was revoked December 1, 1965. Aside from the availability of a call or letter for the purpose, Turner during one of his reprieves met his attorney on the street and conversed with him, but still uttered not a syllable about the appeal.
The answer is, of course, that Turner was not interested in an appeal. His omission to remind his counsel of the appeal cannot be ascribed to ignorance or forgetfulness. The record discloses that he was no tyro in the criminal procedure. His questioning of the 1956 conviction proves his awareness of procedural requisites; he instituted post-conviction proceedings in the State court in early 1966 and sought habeas corpus in the District Court in April 1967, the initiation of the present case, without an attorney.
If Turner had the intelligence to ask originally for an appeal, he certainly was competent to inquire about it before the passage of nearly 10 years. Either he was unconcerned about the appeal, or he purposely let it sleep so as to erase the conviction through a belated attack. In either aspect there was a waiver of appeal.
Concededly, time is not always the measure of waiver. There are instances where many years have intervened between conviction and complaint of unjust deprivation. Thus no waiver was seen in Fay v. Noia, 372 U.S. 391, 83 S.Ct. 822, 9 L.Ed.2d 837 (1963), where the petitioner failed to ask for an appeal because he was afraid he would receive a harsher sentence if he won retrial, and then waited more than 10 years to seek relief. That was an excuse hardly comparable to Turner’s deliberate abstention from inquiry.
I recognize that the State cannot curtail an accused’s privileges, but he has obligations, too. He should not be permitted to flout the judicial processes. I would dismiss Turner’s petition. Otherwise North Carolina is unwarrantably obstructed in restraining the criminal.