Court Opinion

ID: 9761958
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:01:52.43351+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:28.210242
License: Public Domain

Justice COATS,
dissenting.
I consider the majority's resolution of this case to be not only misguided but particularly unfortunate as well. Whether the defendant was read and understood the written Spanish advisement and waiver of rights he signed before entering his guilty plea largely involves a determination of fact, which could *1260have been easily, and fairly, resolved by simply affording the People a reasonable opportunity to produce the record of the providen-cy hearing, the interpreter assigned by the court to assist the defendant, and anyone else who might be knowledgeable concerning the defendant's ability to either understand English or read Spanish. Instead, the majority ties itself in knots, compromising both the post-conviction and guilty plea law of the jurisdiction, to defend factual findings supported by nothing more than the defendant's own last-minute, untested, self-serving testimony and a grant of relief never requested by the defendant. Because I believe a criminal defendant is entitled to post-conviction relief only upon actually moving for it and thereby subjecting his assignments of error to proper investigation and challenge, I respectfully dissent.
Criminal defendants are liberally entitled to post-conviction relief in this jurisdiction for violations of the Constitution or laws of either the United States or this state. Their applications for post-conviction review, however, must substantially comply with a specific format and contain specifically designated information, including every ground upon which a claim of unlawful confinement is made. See Crim. P. 85(c)@8)(I1); Crim. P. Form 4. For hopefully obvious reasons, the relief requested by a defendant may not be granted without first causing "a complete copy of said motion to be served on the prosecuting attorney," permitting the prosecution thirty days to respond, and if factual determinations are required, conducting a hearing and taking "whatever evidence is necessary for the disposition of the motion." Crim. P. 85(c)(8)(V).
The defendant in this case applied for post-conviction review of his conviction as required by the rule, but did so without the slightest insinuation that he was not advised of or did not understand the rights he was waiving and the plea he was entering. He did not suggest in any way that he was asserting a defect in his plea amounting to a violation of the federal and state laws or constitutions. See Crim. P. 35(0)@)(D. Rather he asserted, in elaborate detail, that he was entitled to a new trial on the basis of newly discovered evidence undermining his wife's credibility. See Crim. P. He relied exclusively on our holding in People v. Schneider, 25 P.8d 755, 762 (Colo.2001), which entitles even defendants entering guilty pleas to a new trial based on newly discovered evidence in the limited cireum-stance in which the charges against them are demonstrably false or unfounded. Rather than asserting that his plea was involuntary or unintelligent, or was in any other way unlawful or defective, the defendant instead expressly alleged that the charges to which he pled were false or unfounded.
After hearing the matter, the magistrate completely rejected as unfounded the defendant's claim of entitlement to a new trial based on newly discovered evidence. Nevertheless, the magistrate vacated the defendant's guilty plea as involuntary and unintelligent, reasoning that Schneider impliedly found a motion for post-conviction relief based on newly discovered evidence to simultaneously put at issue the validity of the underlying guilty plea. To the contrary, in Schneider we narrowly cireumseribed the relief available for newly discovered evidence following guilty pleas precisely because such claims necessarily accept, rather than contest, the validity of the underlying plea and instead seek new trials entirely on equitable grounds. See id. at 761; see also Farrar v. People, 208 P.3d 702, 706 (Colo.2009) (motion for new trial based on newly discovered evidence does not challenge the lawfulness of the underlying conviction). Perhaps in tacit recognition of the post-conviction magistrate's confusion, the majority does not rely on, or even mention, this rationale for notice to the prosecution.1
Instead the majority advances other (but equally unconvincing) justifications for the defendant's failure to assert, in his motion for post-conviction relief, the ineffectiveness of his plea. The majority suggests both that the prosecutor was given adequate notice by *1261the magistrate's hints about his concerns just prior to taking the matter under advisement and that any entitlement to notice the prosecution might have had was somehow diminished or eliminated by the fact that the prosecutor was cross-examining the defendant when he first made his surprise revelation of ignorance. With regard to the former, although the majority nowhere identifies a procedural default by the prosecution, it apparently intends that the prosecutor abandoned any objection by failing to anticipate and preemptively challenge as improper the basis of the court's subsequent written ruling. With regard to the latter, the majority would apparently penalize the prosecution for attempting to cross-examine the defendant after he unresponsively and without prior warning injected his claim of illiteracy into the hearing. To most readers it might seem obvious from the timing of these two events alone that by the time they happened the prosecutor lacked any meaningful opportunity to rebut the defendant's testimony.
In any event, the majority proceeds to suggest, in reliance on the plain error doctrine of Crim. P. 52, that it was within the discretion of the Crim. P. 85(c) magistrate to address the lawfulness of the defendant's guilty plea, despite its never having been raised in a motion for post-conviction relief, because a guilty plea includes the waiver of substantial rights. The plain error doctrine permits limited review of obvious trial error based on its seriousness, despite the absence of contemporaneous objection. It in no way implies that errors (whether objected to or not) may be reviewed without being raised in the reviewing court, and the authorities relied on by the majority suggest nothing of the sort. We have previously identified situations in which an appellate court may be justified in exercising its discretion to review important issues not expressly raised by a party, see Roberts v. Am. Family Mut. Ins. Co., 144 P.3d 546, 549-51 (Colo.2006), but even on appellate review, which is based entirely on an existing record, we have been cognizant of the importance of providing an opportunity for an adversely affected party to respond. Unlike appellate review, a motion for post-conviction relief is provided for the express purpose of taking evidence and developing an additional record, making notice in time for meaningful rebuttal all the more essential.
Finally the majority finds that the defendant's advisement was inadequate and that he failed to understand even the rights of which he was advised. The boilerplate selected by the majority notwithstanding, we have long held that although a providency hearing is designed to evidence the constitutional validity of guilty pleas, see People v. Leonard, 673 P.2d 37, 39-40 (Colo.1983), and therefore compliance with Crim. P. 11 will normally satisfy constitutional due process concerns, see People v. District Court, 868 P.2d 400, 404 (Colo.1994), violations of the rule do not necessarily amount to a constitutional violation. In particular, we have expressly held that a defendant's in-court affirmation that he understood the matters described in a written and signed advisement of his rights provides sufficient compliance with the rule. People v. Rockwell, 125 P.3d 410, 418 (Colo.2005). As the record on appeal makes perfectly clear, the providency hearing was delayed to permit the defendant an additional opportunity to have read to him and sign a written advisement of his rights, after which he affirmed, on the record, that he read or had read to him his rights and had questions only about his personal recognizance bond. Because the defendant's Motion for Post-Conviction Relief merely alleged newly discovered evidence, however, neither the transcript of the trial court's advisement nor the complete written Spanish advisement and waiver of rights, including the handwritten specifics of the plea agreement itself, which was signed by both the defendant and the court, was ever considered by the post-conviction court.
The question whether the defendant perjured himself in claiming at his providency hearing to have read, or had read to him, and understood this written Advisal of Rights, or whether he perjured himself in later claiming at his post-conviction hearing not to understand English, read Spanish, or have had his Spanish Advisal of Rights read to him by his interpreter, is clearly a matter of fact, or credibility. And while many judicial officers might have found a defendant's subsequent self-serving recantation less credible than did *1262the magistrate in this case, it was clearly for the magistrate, as the trier of fact, whether to believe the defendant was being truthful at the post-conviction rather than the provi-dency hearing. The point is, however, that the defendant's failure to plead the inadequacy of his advisement or his lack of understanding effectively precluded consideration of any evidence contradicting his post-convietion testimony.
If, as appears to be the case, the defendant is facing deportation consequences of which he was unaware at the time of the providency hearing, he may have alternate grounds for vacating his plea. Cf. Padilla v. Kentucky, - U.S. -, - - -, 130 S.Ct. 1473, 1482-83, 176 L.Ed.2d 284 (2010); People v. Pozo, 746 P.2d 523, 528-29 (Colo.1987). If his post-conviction testimony was indeed truthful, he would at least appear to have a legitimate claim that his post-conviction counsel was ineffective for not asserting the ineffectiveness and invalidity of his plea in the first place. See Silva v. People, 156 P.3d 1164, 1168-69 (Colo.2007). In my view, however, the defendant's entitlement to relief on these grounds must be established as an evidentiary matter, after proper pleading in a proper forum.
Because I am disinclined to compromise sound principles of law, no matter how sympathetic a particular defendant may be, I respectfully dissent.
I am authorized to state that Justice RICE and Justice EID join in this dissent.

. By footnote the majority attempts to distinguish Farrar but not on the grounds that the defendant's claim of newly discovered evidence put the prosecutor on notice of a challenge to the validity of his guilty plea as well. See maj. op. at 1257 n.2.