Court Opinion

ID: 9484418
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:53:08.613119+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:50:14.283620
License: Public Domain

DAVID A NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the court’s judgment, but for reasons that differ from those of my colleagues on the panel.
With respect to the government’s motion to withdraw from the plea agreement, I do not believe that the essential facts were in dispute. If my reading of the record is correct in this respect, the district court was not foreclosed from granting the government’s motion without further proof. The government was not obliged to introduce evidence proving its stated version of the facts if this version was not questioned by the defendant.
I agree that a remand is required here, however, because I am not sure why the district court granted the motion to withdraw. The comments made by the court in announcing its ruling could be read as suggesting that whether or not there had been a material breach of the.plea agreement, either side should be free to withdraw on the basis of a subjective belief that there had been a breach by the other side. That is not the law, as I understand it; what matters is not what the parties may think, but whether the court concludes that there has been a material breach of the plea bargain.
With respect to the career offender question, the aggravated motor vehicle theft count of the information filed against the defendant in Colorado alleged that the defendant had exercised control over a taxi cab “without authorization and by threat and deception.” The defendant pleaded guilty to that count, and his guilty plea was unquestionably admissible. The only known facts that would sustain such a plea make it clear that the defendant stole the taxi cab by threatening the cab driver with a knife, rather than by any non-physical threat or deception. If the career offender issue were the only one before us, therefore, I doubt that a remand would be necessary.