Court Opinion

ID: 9477368
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:21:43.81899+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:50.594646
License: Public Domain

CANBY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I dissent because I believe that Torrey’s plea was uninformed and therefore involuntary. Torrey was advised that he could be sentenced to state prison if he was not accepted by the Youth Authority. At the time of his plea, however, Torrey knew that he had been accepted by the Youth Authority. He was told that if he was sent to the Youth Authority, he would remain there until he was 25 years old and that, if he was then considered to be a danger to the community, he might have to remain with the Youth Authority longer. He was never warned that, even though he had been accepted by the Youth Authority, he could still be resentenced to state prison. Yet he is now in state prison serving a sentence of 25 years to life. Under this set *238of facts, I cannot agree that Torrey was properly informed of his “range of allowable punishment.” United States ex rel. Pebworth v. Conte, 489 F.2d 266, 268 (9th Cir.1974).
The sentence Torrey is now serving was a direct result of his plea. It is true that the line between direct consequences, of which the defendant must be warned, and collateral consequences, of which he need not be warned, is not easily drawn. But Torrey was sentenced anew by the original sentencing court for the crime to which he pleaded guilty. His situation is different from that of a parole violator, who is determined by the independent parole commission to have violated a condition of his parole and is returned to prison to finish his original sentence. While Torrey did misbehave while in custody of the Youth Authority, his resentencing is not truly based on that misbehavior, but on his original plea. We are not controlled by the view of the Eighth Circuit that direct consequences must be “largely automatic.” George v. Black, 732 F.2d 108, 110 (8th Cir.1984) (quoting Cuthrell v. Director, Patuxent Institution, 475 F.2d 1364 (4th Cir.), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 1005, 94 S.Ct. 362, 38 L.Ed.2d 241 (1973)). In any event, the Eighth Circuit cases dealt with independent civil commitment proceedings, which were much less directly connected to a guilty plea than Torrey’s prison sentence. In the end, the question is whether the consequence is so closely related to the plea that fairness requires that the defendant be warned. In my view Torrey’s prison sentence meets that test. I would grant the writ and permit him to withdraw his plea.