Court Opinion

ID: 9653799
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:55:46.604193+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:02.014486
License: Public Domain

John I. Purtle, Justice, dissenting. This is an appeal from the denial of a Rule 37 petition alleging ineffective assistance of counsel for failure to assert a speedy trial defense on appellant’s behalf. He was arrested, along with another person named Duncan, on October 18, 1982. He entered a guilty plea on September 10, 1987. The entry of his plea came almost five years after his arrest. At the evidentiary hearing on the Rule 37 petition in 1988, his former attorney stated that he had reached an agreement with the prosecuting attorney in 1983 to continue the appellant’s case until after Duncan’s trial. The docket reflects that there was a motion for a continuance entered on July 13, 1983. The docket does not reflect that this motion was ever acted upon. Rule 28.3(a) states in part: No pretrial motion shall be held under advisement for more than thirty (30) days, and the period of time in excess of thirty (30) days during which any such motion is held under advisement shall not be considered an excluded period. Duncan was tried on April 10, 1985. That is 21 months after the motion for a continuance based on the agreement with the prosecutor. Therefore, 21 months should be deducted from the 59 months between the appellant’s arrest and the entry of his plea. After this deduction 38 months still must be reckoned with. Petitioner’s trial was finally set for October 1985. He made a motion for a continuance, which was granted in an order dated November 1, 1985. This order also contained the first record of the agreement between former defense counsel and the prosecutor for the continuance which had been entered into in 1983. (There is no evidence that the appellant was told about this agreement.) The weakest link in the state’s case, as noted in the majority opinion, is that the agreement between the defense attorney and the prosecutor was not entered of record until November, 1985. The most difficult point to explain about the majority opinion is that Duncan was tried on April 10, 1985, 17 months before the appellant’s guilty plea, and on direct appeal we reversed and dismissed because he had been denied a speedy trial. The maximum allowable time for bringing the appellant’s case to trial was 18 months. That period has been doubled and still we find no violation of the rule.