Court Opinion

ID: 9736439
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:56:46.100019+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:27:06.659591
License: Public Domain

BARNES, Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur with the majority's resolution of the evidentiary issue. After reflecting upon and reviewing the Smylie decision, I have concluded that I cannot and do not concur with the analysis of Muney's Blakely argument and respectfully dissent on that issue. I concede there are reasons why it might be appropriate to conclude a defendant has waived or forfeited any Blakely arguments if he or she was sentenced after Blakely was decided but failed to make a Sixth Amendment argument to the trial court. I also acknowledge that other panels of this court have taken the waiver position that the majority does here. See Gornick v. State, 832 N.E.2d 1031, 1033-34 (Ind.Ct.App.2005); Clark v. State, 829 N.E.2d 589, 590 (Ind.Ct.App.2005). I simply do not read Smylie in the way that colleagues of mine have. With respect to defendants sentenced before Smylie was decided, I do not agree that there is waiver or forfeiture of a Blakely claim for failing to object to the trial court.
In Smylie, issued several months after Muncy was sentenced, our supreme court for the first time directly addressed Blakety's application to Indiana's sentencing scheme and held the scheme was invalid, at least to the extent that it permitted judges to enhance sentences above the presumptive based on facts neither admitted by the defendant nor proven to a jury. Smylie, 823 N.E.2d at 683-84. Smylie also addressed whether the defendant there had waived his argument regarding Blakely because he had failed to lodge a Sixth Amendment objection to his sentencing procedures. Our supreme court concluded there was no waiver or forfeiture of this argument and held, "a defendant need not have objected at trial in order to raise a Blakely claim on appeal inasmuch as not raising a Blakely claim before its issuance would fall within the range of effective lawyering." Id. at 691.
Smylie did not directly address forfeiture or waiver in the context of a defen*219dant sentenced after Blakely but before Smylie; the only issue it had to address was the situation before it, i.e. a defendant sentenced before Blakely but whose appeal was pending when Blakely was decided. Nevertheless, our supreme court clearly implied that a defendant sentenced after Blakely but before Smylie should not be considered to have waived or forfeited a Blakely argument for failing to make a Sixth Amendment objection to the trial court. The Smylie opinion states, "Because Blakely represents a new rule that was sufficiently novel that it would not have been generally predicted, much less envisioned to invalidate part of Indiana's sentencing structure, requiring a defendant or counsel to have prognosticated the outcome of Blakely or of today's decision would be unjust." 823 N.E.2d at 689 (emphasis added). It is impossible for me to explain away this sentence. It says, unequivocally, that it "would be unjust" to require defendants or their attorneys to have lodged a Blakely objection to sentencing before Smylie was decided. I read this as binding precedent and a directive for us to follow-period.
The majority quotes Smylie as support for the proposition that because Muncy did not object on Sixth Amendment grounds during his sentencing hearing, he " "forfeit, ed [his] ability to appeal [his] sentence on Blakely grounds'" Op. at 218 (quoting Smylie, 823 N.E.2d at 689). The entire quote in Smylie is, "we agree with the State that it is entirely possible for defendants to have waived or forfeited their ability to appeal their sentence on Blakely grounds." Smylie 823 N.E.2d at 689. However, Smylie ultimately held only that such waiver or forfeiture occurs if a defendant has "appealed without raising any complaint at all about the propriety of their sentence...." Id. at 690. Smylie nowhere holds that a failure to object to the trial court in a post-Blakely, pre-§my-lie sentencing hearing waives or forfeits any Blakely argument. Instead, our supreme court advised, "it is appropriate to be rather liberal in approaching whether an appellant and her lawyer have adequately preserved and raised a Blakely issue." Id. That language seems clear to me, though I concede Smylie himself did not have a Blakely argument to make at the time he was sentenced.
There is another reason why I am not inclined to find waiver or forfeiture of Blakely claims regarding sentencing that occurred between Blakely and Smylie. When Blakely was decided, the Attorney General of Indiana took the public position that Blakely did not impact Indiana's sentencing scheme. See, e.g., National Center for State Courts, Blakely v. Washington: Implications for State Courts, p. 10, available at http://www.nese online.org/WC/ Publicationg/KIS _SentenBlakely.pdf (July 16, 2004) ("Indiana is apparently not affected by Blakely, according to a spokesperson for the state's attorney general."). The State argued adamantly and consistently in multiple briefs to this court in numerous cases, as well as in Smylie of course, that Blakely had no effect in Indiana. It seems a bit puzzling for the State to now argue that defendants sentenced after Blakely but before Smylie should have known that Blakely impacted Indiana's sentencing scheme, when the State's chief law enforcement official was consistently stating the opposite. This comes close to judicial estoppel, or the State taking a position in court diametrically opposed to its previous position.
After re-reading Smylie and considering the State's shifting views on the certainty that Blakely invalidated Indiana's sentencing scheme, I would hold that Muncy has not forfeited or waived his Blakely claim in this appeal. Turning to the merits of that claim, Muncy does have a criminal history, *220which is exempt from Blakely's jury-finding requirement. The trial court found several other aggravators, however, that are invalid under Blakely and Smylie, including the nature and circumstances of the crime, Muney's character, and that the attempted battery was against a law enforcement officer during the execution of his duties. Our duty in a case where a trial court has improperly relied upon noncriminal history aggravators neither found by a jury nor admitted by a defendant is to determine whether we can say, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the trial court would have imposed an identical sentence relying strictly on the permissible aggrava-tors and ignoring the impermissible aggra-vators. Freeze v. State, 827 N.E.2d 600, 604 (Ind.Ct.App.2005). I cannot reach that conclusion in this case, given the sheer number of improper aggravators to which the trial court here referred. It is apparent to me that Muncy is entitled to resentencing under Smylie 's guidelines.
I vote to affirm Muncy's convictions but to remand for resentencing.