Court Opinion

ID: 9542213
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:32:03.150724+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:07:09.292300
License: Public Domain

T. E. Brennan, J.
(dissenting). Defendant was charged with murder. He pled guilty to the lesser and included offense of manslaughter on January 13, 1969, and was sentenced to a term of 10 to 15 years in prison.
Appeal was taken by the defendant from that guilty plea conviction. The people confessed error *435and the Court of Appeals reversed the conviction in People v McMiller, 20 Mich App 309 (1969).
Thereafter, the defendant was re-arraigned on the original information charging murder. A jury trial resulted in a conviction of second-degree murder and defendant was sentenced on February 27, 1970, to a term of 15 to 20 years in prison.
Defendant appealed, claiming double jeopardy, and attacked the higher sentence, citing North Carolina v Pearce, 395 US 711; 89 S Ct 2072; 23 L Ed 2d 656 (1969).
The Court of Appeals affirmed, taking issue with Mullreed v Kropp, 425 F2d 1095 (CA 6, 1970), and holding the harsher sentence justified where the second conviction was for a more serious offense. 38 Mich App 99 (1972).
The Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan has filed an Amicus Curiae Brief.
It is conceded that upon a trial for murder, conviction of manslaughter operates as an acquittal of the murder charge, People v Knapp, 26 Mich 112 (1872); People v Comstock, 55 Mich 405 (1884); Green v United States, 355 US 184; 78 S Ct 221; 2 L Ed 2d 199 (1957), and upon a new trial, the defendant cannot be convicted of the higher offense.
Green v United States, supra, gives two reasons for the rule. The first is based upon the theory of implied acquittal. The Green Court said:
"Green was in direct peril of being convicted and punished for first degree murder at his first trial. He was forced to run the gantlet once on that charge and the jury refused to convict him. When given the choice between finding him guilty of either first or second degree murder it chose the latter. In this situation the great majority of cases in this country have regarded *436the jury’s verdict as an implicit acquittal on the charge of first degree murder.” (p 190.)
The . second reason is founded in the Court’s concern for the chilling effect of attaching a forfeiture or disadvantage to the exercise of a constitutional right.
"Reduced to plain terms, the Government contends that in order to secure the reversal of an erroneous conviction of one offense, a defendant must surrender his valid defense of former jeopardy not only on that offense but also on a different offense for which he was not convicted and which was not involved in his appeal. Or stated in the terms of this case, he must be willing to barter his constitutional protection against a second prosecution for an offense punishable by death as the price of a successful appeal from an erroneous conviction of another offense for which he has been sentenced to five to twenty years’ imprisonment. As the Court of Appeals said in its first opinion in this case, a defendant faced with such a 'choice’ takes a 'desperate chance’ in securing the reversal of the erroneous conviction. The law should not, and in our judgment does not, place the defendant in such an incredible dilemma. Conditioning an appeal of one offense on a coerced surrender of a valid plea of former jeopardy on another offense exacts a forfeiture in plain conflict with the constitutional bar against double jeopardy.” (pp 193-194.)
■ Neither of these reasons apply in the case at bar, where the former, vacated conviction is based upon the defendant’s plea of guilty to a specific included offense.
At no time did this defendant, McMiller, "run the gantlet” on the charge of murder. At no time was any judge or jury "given the choice between finding him guilty of either first or second degree murder” or manslaughter. Because he pled guilty to manslaughter, this defendant was never in *437jeopardy, never in danger, never exposed, in the constitutional sense, to a conviction of murder.
A plea of guilty, unlike a verdict, does not operate as an implied acquittal of higher offenses. In the case of a verdict, it is the choice of the jury which gives rise to the implied acquittal. But a plea of guilty is made by the defendant himself. It cannot be said that he has impliedly acquitted himself of the higher charge by his plea to the lesser offense.
Similarly, the rationale of the chilling effect of retrial upon the higher offense is inapplicable in the case of an appeal from a guilty plea.
Unlike the jury-tried defendant, the plea-convicted defendant has not purchased his claim of double jeopardy at the price of anxiety. He has not waited, wondering, while a jury deliberated his fate.
Indeed, his only claim to a defense of double jeopardy stems from his own words of admission. The only "choice,” or "desperate chance”, or "incredible dilemma” he faces is the precise set of alternatives which confronted him before he entered his plea of guilty in the first place.
The jury-tried defendant should not be required to barter away his double jeopardy defense to the higher charge as the price of appealing the lesser conviction. He has earned that defense. It is his. To require its surrender, is to ask a price or forfeiture.
But the plea-convicted defendant has not earned his double jeopardy defense to the higher charge. He holds it only conditionally as a necessary concomitant of his plea-based conviction. It has no independent basis; no vitality apart from the guilty plea conviction. It is not forfeited as the price of appeal; a successful appeal is rather the *438agency of its destruction because the vacated guilty plea was the cornerstone of its existence.
Practical considerations abound. It is everywhere acknowledged that the disposition of criminal charges upon pleas of guilty is essential to the orderly administration of justice. It is also acknowledged in most places that appellate challenges to guilty pleas have multiplied intolerably.
The dismissal of higher charges contemporaneously with the entry of pleas to lesser offenses is a daily occurrence. The practice is called plea bargaining. Whatever its shortcomings, plea bargaining is the result of the needs, the desires, and the decisions of practical men on both sides of the adversary criminal process.
The rule of Mullreed v Kropp, supra, destroys the balance at the plea bargaining table. It holds out to a defendant the opportunity, through appellate review, to obtain the benefit of his bargain while avoiding the natural consequence thereof.
Mullreed was a hard case, to be sure. The Circuit Court of Appeals topk care in its recitation of facts to suggest that the prosecuting attorney had overcharged the defendant in the first instance; that the plea was coerced under threat of incarceration without bail and without speedy trial; that a codefendant received a very minimal sentence, while Mullreed was treated sternly:
"A week later both of the defendants had an 'interview’ with the State Prosecutor,. at which time the Prosecutor informed them that he had some doubts as to whether a chair would constitute a dangerous weapon for purposes of the armed robbery statute. For that reason he said he was adding a second count to the information, a lesser offense, 'robbery unarmed.’ After explaining this charge and the penalties, the Prosecutor told both defendants that there would be no jury in the Jackson County Circuit Court for three months; that *439unless defendants could furnish bail they would have to remain in jail until then and would be prosecuted on the 'robbery armed’ count with the second count added.
"Both men agreed to plead guilty to 'robbery unarmed.’ When taken before the Court Passow renounced his decision. He later obtained counsel, went before a different judge and received a sixty day sentence. Mullreed, however, stuck by his agreement and pleaded guilty. The plea was accepted by the Court, and he was sentenced to serve ten to fifteen years in the state prison.” (pp 1096-1097.)
But none of these unhappy considerations bear upon the question of whether a plea of guilty to a lesser included offense operates as an implied acquittal of the higher charge.
To reach that conclusion, it was necessary for the Circuit Court of Appeals on two occasions to refer to the arraignment at which the defendant pleaded guilty as "a trial to the court” and a "non-jury trial”.
It was also necessary for the Circuit Court of Appeals to conclude that the requirement in our state of judicial investigation into the truth of a guilty plea, MCLA 768.35; MSA 28.1058; GCR 1963, 785.3(2), constituted an affirmative finding upon the elements of the lesser offense, so as to operate as an implied acquittal of the more serious charge.
Both of these conclusions are at variance with Michigan law and practice. Proceedings upon a guilty plea are not trials in any sense of the word. They are, rather, arraignments, as clearly shown by the subtitle of GCR 1963, 785.3, and the language of the rule.
Nor do the aforementioned statutes and court rule vest the court with any jurisdiction to find the defendant guilty upon the higher charge. There is no "refusal to convict on the greater” offense, from *440which any implication of acquittal can flow. Since the defendant cannot complain of a plea taken to an offense less than actually committed, People v Collins, 380 Mich 131 (1968), the statutory inquiry need determine only his minimum guilt. The general rule is that, where a criminal information is dismissed before a jury has been sworn, or evidence taken thereon, the dismissal is not an acquittal. The defendant is not regarded as having been in jeopardy thereon. People v Kuhn, 67 Mich 463 (1887).
There is no reason to apply a different rule merely because simultaneously with the dismissal a plea of guilty is entered upon a lesser offense.
As long as the defendant’s plea-based conviction for manslaughter remained, it was a bar to prosecution for murder.
This is not because the defendant had been impliedly acquitted of murder, but because he stood convicted of manslaughter arising out of the same homicide.
In Green v United States, supra, the Court reasoned that the defendant was entitled to the benefit of the plea of autrefois acquit or former acquittal stemming from the jury’s implied acquittal of first-degree murder.
Were this defendant McMiller to have been charged with murder, while his manslaughter conviction remained, his defense would have been autrefois convict or a former conviction resting upon the same identical act or crime. People v Gault, 104 Mich 575 (1895); People v Beverly, 247 Mich 353 (1929).
The conviction is affirmed.
M. S. Coleman, J., concurred with T. E. Brennan, J.
Levin, J., did not sit in this case.