Court Opinion

ID: 9477831
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:32:36.480873+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:04.731941
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I agree with the statement of the majority that it is “fundamentally unfair to treat similarly situated defendants differently where the difference in Bruun’s and Bont-kowski’s cases is solely a matter of timing.” This should end the matter, and Bontkowski’s conviction for aiding and *316abetting in the misapplication of bank funds should be vacated as was Bruun’s. Instead the majority has remanded to the district court to determine whether Bont-kowski may have waived the claim that he lacked the requisite intent by failing to raise it on direct appeal before United States v. Bruun, 809 F.2d 397 (7th Cir.1987), was decided. This seems to me to place strained and hypertechnical considerations as obstacles in the path of correcting what is “fundamentally unfair.” The case before us is a truly “special case” where I believe the interests of justice are genuinely implicated. Cf. Murray v. Carrier, 477 U.S. 478, 495, 106 S.Ct. 2639, 2650, 91 L.Ed. 2d 397 (1986) (“ ‘[i]n appropriate cases’, the principles of comity and finality that inform the concepts of cause and prejudice ‘must yield to the imperative of correcting fundamentally unjust incarceration’ ”) (quoting Engle v. Isaac, 456 U.S. 107, 135, 102 S.Ct. 1558, 1576, 71 L.Ed.2d 783 (1982)).
On another point, the majority rejects Bontkowski’s claim that his guilty plea was involuntary. This court has held, most recently in United States v. Ellison, 835 F.2d 687 (7th Cir.1987), that defendants must be bound by voluntary responses made under oath in plea colloquies. Blackledge v. Allison, 431 U.S. 63, 97 S.Ct. 1621, 52 L.Ed.2d 136 (1977), cautions, however, that courts “cannot fairly adopt a per se rule excluding all possibility that a defendant’s representations ... were so much the product of such factors as misunderstanding, duress, or misrepresentation by others as to make the guilty plea a constitutionally inadequate basis for imprisonment.” Id. at 75, 97 S.Ct. at 1629-30. I do not think that Bontkowski’s bare allegation that the prosecution threatened to seek stiffer penalties against his wife if he declined to plead guilty — an allegation unsupported by Bont-kowski’s representation in his original section 2255 petition attributing his failure to raise his objections on direct appeal to ineffective assistance of counsel — is sufficient to trigger a hearing on the question of voluntariness. Cf. Key v. United States, 806 F.2d 133, 139-40 (7th Cir.1986). But I think it is important to observe that “threats to prosecute third parties can carry leverage wholly unrelated to the validity of the underlying charge” and to stress that courts must be even more zealous than usual when they assess the volun-tariness of plea bargains involving third party beneficiaries. United States v. Nuckols, 606 F.2d 566, 569 (5th Cir.1979).