Court Opinion

ID: 9740448
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:35:52.80206+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:18.329501
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Schaefer, dissenting: Although it is not so stated in the opinion of the court, the fact is that the indigent defendant in this case was represented upon his trial by counsel appointed by the court. I think that fact is determinative of the underlying issue, and therefore I dissent. To me the important question, which lies just beneath the surface of the opinion of the court, is whether or not the defendant received competent representation by the attorney that the State of Illinois appointed to represent him, when that attorney has, by his 'failure- to take a simple procedural step, forever barred the defendant’s right to the ordinary full appellate review of the trial at which he was convicted.. If we look only at the date of the judgment of conviction, and at the date when the report of proceedings was filed, 'the conclusion follows automatically that it was not filed within the time prescribed by Rule 65 — 1, and that the appeal should be dismissed. Since. Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U.S. 12, 100 L. ed. 891, however, that is not the approach that this court has taken in cases in which the defendant was represented at the trial by appointed counsel. Instead we have, over the years, denied numerous motions to dismiss writs of error in cases in which appointed counsel, who represented an indigent defendant in the trial court, had failed to request a free transcript of the testimony, with the result that no report of proceedings was filed within the prescribed time. And after the motion to dismiss were denied, this court reviewed the cases on the merits. We adopted that course, which is now abandoned, for severely practical reasons. If prejudicial error was committed upon the trial, the time to discover it is now, so that the case can be retried while the witnesses are still available. Ignoring the question of the adequacy of the defendant’s representation does not eliminate it. The question will be raised in this or other cases in petitions under the Post-Conviction Hearing Act. (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1961, chap. 38, pars. 826-832.) And if this court then decides that an appointed attorney’s forfeiture of his client’s right to review does not demonstrate incompetence, the question will go to the Federal courts on habeas corpus. Whatever the Supreme Court of the United States may ultimately decide, I think that this court should hold, as a matter of due process under the constitution of Illinois, that the failure to take such a simple step, which has such serious consequences, is inadequate representation by court-appointed counsel. If it is thought that the duty of an attorney appointed to represent a defendant in the trial court does not include the obligation to protect the right of review, the situation is not improved, for then Illinois has failed to furnish counsel to an indigent defendant at a critical stage of the proceedings. In most cases the failure of an attorney representing an indigent prisoner to apply for a free transcript under our Rule 65 — 1 will have been due to ignorance or oversight. The analogy to civil cases is relevant. An annotation in 45 A.L.R. 2d 5, 52, collects cases dealing with the liability of attorneys in civil cases for failure to protect their client’s right to appeal. The first sentence of this portion of the annotation is as follows: “Negligence of an attorney in failing to take proper steps to protect his client’s right of appeal or review has been held actionable in several cases, where, as a result, the right of appeal was lost.” It is possible, of course, that there may be a few cases in which an appointed attorney who represented an indigent defendant in the trial court deliberately refrained from applying for a transcript of the testimony because he. was “unable to find any error or errors that would have any merit to assign upon an appeal.” But even in those rare cases, the right of an appointed attorney to make such a determination is not free from doubt. In Brown v. State, 239 Ind. 184, 154 N.E.2d 720, the defendant’s conviction had already been affirmed by the Supreme Court of Indiana when the public defender took the quoted position with respect to an appeal from a subsequent adverse judgment in a coram nobis proceeding. Both the United States District Court and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals held that this action on the part of the public defender violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. (United States ex rel. Brown v. Lane, (7th cir.) 302 Fed.2d 537.) Very recently the Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari in this case. . . In my opinion the constitutional issue overrides the jurisdictional aspects of the time limitation that we have imposed by our Rule 65 — 1, and we should decide this case on the merits. Solfisburg, C.J., and Hershey, J., join in this dissent.