Court Opinion

ID: 9784486
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 20:46:13.706542+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:35:55.217740
License: Public Domain

MANNHEIMER, Judge,
concurring.
I write separately to address the speedy trial issue because I analyze this issue differently from my colleagues.
The resolution of Baker’s speedy trial claim hinges on the recorded events of October 11-12, 1999, but it also hinges on certain other things that are not part of the record.
The record shows that the parties met in court on the morning of Monday, October 11th to decide when Baker’s trial would commence. Baker’s assistant public defender announced that she would be unavailable for two weeks starting on Wednesday, October 13th. The prosecutor then announced that the State had witness problems: key witnesses would not be available until October 18th and then would be unavailable for six weeks starting on October 21st. In other words, it appeared that if Baker’s trial was going to be held before December, only three days were available: October 18th-20th.
For his part, Baker was opposed to any continuance; he wanted a trial as soon as possible. The judge presiding at this hearing, District Court Judge Natalie K. Finn, explained to Baker that if he insisted on an immediate trial, this would mean going to trial with a new attorney who was unfamiliar with his case. Baker told Judge Finn that he was willing to proceed with an unprepared attorney if that was necessary to procure an immediate trial.
Judge Finn then set Baker’s trial for October 19th and 20th (with jury selection to be held on October 15th). As explained above, Baker’s assistant public defender had announced that she would unavailable on these dates, so these trial dates necessarily required the Public Defender Agency to assign a new attorney to Baker’s case.
But later that same afternoon, Presiding Superior Court Judge Elaine M. Andrews notified the parties that Baker’s trial would commence the next day (October 12th). This change of Baker’s trial date was the first in a series of events that find no ready explanation in the record.
*1005The record does not reveal why Judge Andrews decided to set aside- the trial dates that had been announced by Judge Finn earlier that day, or why Judge Andrews decided that Baker’s trial should begin the very next day. Conceivably, Judge Andrews set Baker’s trial for October 12th because that was the last day that Baker’s current attorney would be available. Judge Andrews may have been concerned that a new defense attorney who took over Baker’s case at the last minute would be unable to represent Baker effectively. But this is concededly speculation on my part. The record contains no explanation for Judge Andrews’s action.
The record is similarly sparse concerning the explanation for the two attorneys’ strange responses to this last-minute rescheduling of Baker’s trial. As explained above, the trial dates set by Judge Finn (October 19th and 20th) had been hammered out after much wrangling between the parties. One would therefore expect howls of protest from Baker’s attorney, and from the prosecutor as well, when these two attorneys received notice on the afternoon of October 11th that Judge Andrews had vacated Judge Finn’s trial dates and had instead set Baker’s trial for the following day (October 12th).
But neither attorney responded to Judge Andrews by telling her that they had just been in court earlier that day, and that they had settled on October 19th and 20th as the only trial days that were acceptable to all sides. Instead, when Baker’s assistant public defender filed her response to Judge Andrews’s new trial date, she simply reiterated that she would be unavailable between October 13th and October 26th. And when the prosecutor responded to Judge Andrews, he simply reiterated that his witnesses would be unavailable unless the trial was held between October 18th and October 20th.
Why didn’t either of these two attorneys protest Judge Andrews’s decision and tell her that they wished to stick with the trial dates hammered out in front of Judge Finn earlier that day? The record contains no explanation.
My two colleagues infer, from this lack of protest, that the Public Defender Agency told Baker’s assistant public defender that there would be no replacement attorney— either because the Agency was unable to assign a new attorney to Baker’s case on a week’s notice, or because the Agency was unwilling to send an attorney into court unprepared. Following this train of inference, my colleagues conclude that Baker’s attorney did not insist on Judge Finn’s trial dates because the attorney knew that she was still the one representing Baker, and because she would not be available for a trial on those dates.
My colleagues’ inferences may be true. Alternatively, one could infer that the defense attorney’s lack of protest stemmed from the fact that, later on October 11th, Baker told the defense attorney that he had reconsidered his situation and had decided that he did not wish to go to trial with an unprepared attorney.
The problem is that the record available to us does not resolve whether either or both of these inferences are true, or whether there is yet another explanation for the two attorneys’ seemingly strange responses to Judge Andrews’s action.
My colleagues offer the alternative theory that, even if Judge Andrews could not know for sure what prompted the two attorneys’ responses, she was nevertheless authorized to take the attorneys’ responses at face value and to schedule Baker’s trial for early December — the amount of delay that was apparently needed so that the trial would take place when the two attorneys and their witnesses were available.
As legal support for this alternative, my colleagues rely on this Court’s decision in State v. Jeske, 823 P.2d 6 (Alaska App.1991), where we held that when a defense attorney requests a continuance, “[the] judge setting the date for the defendant’s trial is entitled to rely upon the fact that [Criminal Rule 45] is tolled during that continuance, at least until the judge is affirmatively apprised of the defendant’s objection to the continuance.” 1 My colleagues reason that because *1006Baker’s attorney was asking for a continuance, and because Judge Andrews was never affirmatively notified that Baker did not assent to his attorney’s request, Judge Andrews was justified (under Jeske) in concluding that Rule 45 would be-tolled during the requested continuance.
To me, this comes too close to legal legerdemain. Yes, Baker did not affirmatively notify Judge Andrews that he did not assent to his attorney’s request for a continuance. But Baker was not standing by his attorney’s side on the afternoon of October 11th, or during the business day on October 12th. Instead, he was in jail. Given Baker’s situation, he did all that he could reasonably be expected to do to make his position clear: Only hours before, when Baker appeared in court in front of Judge Finn, he vociferously objected to any further delay of his trial, and he announced himself ready to proceed to trial with an unprepared attorney if that is what it took to insure a speedy trial.
Under these circumstances, I find it unconscionable to rely on Jeske for the proposition that, because Baker did not personally notify Judge Andrews that he objected to his attorney’s request for a continuance, Judge Andrews could presume that Baker assented to the request.
That being said, I agree with my colleagues that we should affirm the district court’s rejection of Baker’s speedy trial claim. I reach that conclusion because I believe that “burden of proof’ is the true question confronting this Court.
The record fails to explain what exactly transpired during the 36 hours following the trial-setting conference in front of Judge Finn on October 11th. When a litigant comes to this Court and seeks reversal of a trial court’s judgement, it is the litigant’s burden to show that error was committed and that this error compromised or defeated the litigant’s legal rights. When the record is silent regarding the facts that are critical to a resolution of the litigant’s claim, this means that the litigant has failed to meet this burden.
If I believed that Baker had not yet had a fair opportunity to make his record, I would vote to have the trial court investigate these factual issues on remand. But Baker had the chance to develop all of these facts when he litigated his motion to dismiss, and he failed to do so. I accordingly join my two colleagues in voting to affirm the district court’s ruling on the speedy trial issue.

. Jeske, 823 P.2d at 9.