Court Opinion

ID: 9470638
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:11:44.248995+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:01.357306
License: Public Domain

*331JOHN R. GIBSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. I believe the better view is that detrimental reliance is necessary to enforce an offer for a plea bargain. Government of Virgin Islands v. Scotland, 614 F.2d 360 (3d Cir.1980). My view and that in Scotland is not based upon contract principles. As stated in Scotland, detrimental reliance implicates due process guarantees. 614 F.2d at 365. The court in Scotland discussed Santobello v. New York, 404 U.S. 257, 92 S.Ct. 495, 30 L.Ed.2d 427 (1971), and reasoned that Santobello recognized a basic estoppel principle. In Santobello the guilty plea had been entered on June 16, 1969, in reliance on an offer that the prosecuting attorney would not recommend a sentence. It was only when the defendant appeared before a different judge for sentencing on January 9, 1970, that he learned that the agreement had been broken. Santobello thus dealt with a situation in which there had been detrimental reliance.
I believe that the majority has adopted a chameleon approach to reliance. The majority first states that petitioner “has not performed any specific action in reliance upon the plea bargain.” Maj. op. at 327-328. It continues “[hjowever, petitioner did rely on the plea proposal to the extent that he considered the terms offered, agreed to accept the plea proposal and communicated his willingness to plead guilty to the prosecuting attorney.” Maj. op. at 328.
It is abundantly clear that the majority has found no detrimental reliance in this case, and its holding requires no detrimental reliance. The majority specifically adopts the reasoning in Cooper v. United States, 594 F.2d 12 (4th Cir.1979), as opposed to the approach in Scotland. Scotland requires a showing of detrimental reliance to enforce a plea offer, but Cooper makes no such requirement. Accordingly, the extended discussion adopting Cooper is unnecessary unless the majority really is finding that there was no detrimental reliance in this case. If there was detrimental reliance, both Scotland and Cooper would support enforcement of the plea offer.
The magistrate in his report and the district court in its order adopting the report concluded that no detrimental reliance was present. Immediately after a lengthy quotation from Scotland underscoring the distinction that Cooper would allow specific performance of a plea offer where there was no detrimental reliance, the magistrate stated that the case was factually similar to Cooper. The petition for habeas corpus as originally filed makes no reference to detrimental reliance, nor does the motion to amend filed by petitioner’s counsel. Petitioner’s counsel, in his objections to the proposed findings and conclusions details a finding of detrimental reliance based upon counsel’s lack of preparedness to go to trial November 8,1972. This argument does not bear upon the issue before us, however, as the November 8 trial resulted in a mistrial and petitioner’s guilty plea was not entered until February 26, 1973.
Cooper enumerated several limitations on its holding. Among the qualifications stated in Cooper is that the plea offer be reasonable in context. Johnson had originally been convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The conviction on this charge was set aside and the guilty plea now before us was later entered to the lesser charge of “accessory after a felony murder.” Johnson’s conviction of burglary carried a twenty-one year sentence and his assault with intent to kill conviction carried a twelve year concurrent sentence. I question whether we can conclude it is reasonable for the prosecutor to offer a concurrent twenty-one year sentence on the murder charge, or accessory after a felony murder charge, which would result in defendant’s receiving the same sentence for murder, burglary and assault that he had received for burglary and assault alone. There is no explanation in the record as to the nature of the mistake that was the reason for the withdrawal of the plea offer. We can only speculate that the prosecutor may have intended to offer a *332consecutive twenty-one year sentence but mistakenly said “concurrent”. That there was a mistake in making the offer in this case, however, is further distinction from the limited circumstances in Cooper, which involved the overruling of a subordinate by a superior in the United States Attorney’s office.
Cooper stressed the significance of this distinguishing circumstance in the following statement:
This necessarily means that once presented, such a proposal may not be withdrawn in the face of proffered acceptance for no other reason than that a superior disagrees with an apparently authorized subordinate’s judgment in making it.
Cooper v. United States, 594 F.2d at 19.
While Cooper is careful to make plain the factual limitations on the scope of its holding and the majority here seems to do so, the net result in this case is simply to expand the Cooper rule to an unacceptable extreme.
The majority also holds that a jury trial is an inadequate remedy where a plea bargain offer is withdrawn.1 I find more persuasive the reasoning in Scotland that the great constitutional right to trial by jury is an adequate remedy. While it is true, as the majority states, that a jury trial will not give the defendant the benefit of his bargain with the government, he is not entitled to any particular sentence within the range provided in the statute for the crime with which he is charged. When the government mistakenly makes an offer and then withdraws it, defendant is not being deprived of a specific sentence to which he has a constitutional right.
The majority and Cooper make much of fairness. In Cooper, however, the withdrawal of the plea offer based on the superior’s overruling of the subordinate is a distinct kind of unfairness to the defendant. But here a mistake by the prosecutor involves the interest not only of the defendant, but of the public as well, and has fairness implications of a far different nature. A mistake should be given different treatment from what was at best the insistence on an organizational, if not bureaucratic, prerogative.
For the foregoing reasons, I would affirm.

. Interestingly the majority opinion reverts to the contract law analogy in discussing this question.