Court Opinion

ID: 9470209
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:59:35.633804+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:47.028141
License: Public Domain

RANDALL, Circuit Judge,
specially concurring:
I concur both in the result reached by the panel and in Judge Wisdom’s excellent opinion. I write separately to note one misgiving that I have about that result. It seems to me that, in functional terms and viewed from the standpoint of the court of appeals, there is no meaningful difference between a guilty plea, contingent upon the defendant’s right to appeal his non-jurisdictional defenses, and a not guilty plea, accompanied by a stipulation as to the facts charged in the indictment, all for the purpose of preserving the defendant’s right to appeal his non-jurisdictional defenses. Both appellants stand before us having admitted the facts necessary to convict, arguing only that their convictions should be reversed because of non-jurisdictional defects.
Sepe, however, seems to rest on the logical inconsistency between allowing a defendant to plead guilty and thereby to agree that the state may lawfully convict him, and at the same time agreeing that he may assert on appeal non-jurisdictional defenses that would invalidate his conviction. Obviously the same logical inconsistency does not exist where the defendant pleads not guilty (precisely because he thinks that his non-jurisdictional defenses are valid bars to his conviction) and stipulates to the factual allegations in the indictment.
It seems to me that the inevitable result of Sepe’s prohibition of conditional guilty pleas is the scenario we have here — a plea of not guilty, accompanied by a stipulation as to the facts necessary to convict. Were *711we to focus on the functional similarity between that procedure and a conditional guilty plea, and to extend Sepe to cover this situation, the inevitable result of this case would be, as Judge Wisdom points out, not guilty pleas, accompanied by meaningless and unnecessary trials. In view of the undesirability of that result and because I think that the rationale underlying Sepe is not applicable to a case in which the defendant pleads not guilty, I agree with the majority that Sepe should not be extended to this case.