Court Opinion

ID: 9485896
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:33:21.371262+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:25.944712
License: Public Domain

E. GRADY JOLLY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent because the majority’s overgeneralized analysis fails completely to focus on what Supreme Court precedent clearly dictates is the central issue involved in this case: the voluntary nature of Pierce’s guilty plea. See Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. 742, 748, 90 S.Ct. 1463, 1469, 25 L.Ed.2d 747 (1970). The majority opinion holds the district court’s Rule 11 error to be “harmless” because: (1) Pierce ultimately received less than the 18-year maximum sentence that the district court informed him of at the Rule 11 hearing; and (2) the 20-year increase in Pierce’s potential maximum sentence caused by the post-hoc 18 U.S.C. § 3147 enhancement would not constitute a material factor affecting his decision to plead guilty. With all due respect, the majority’s analysis could not be more flawed when it effectively says that a defendant can enter, as a matter of law, a voluntary, knowing, and intelligent plea of guilty when the actual peril faced by the defendant was more than twice as great as he was told by the district court at the time he entered his plea. The effect of the majority’s holding is that when a defendant is sentenced to a term less than the maximum sentence of which he is advised, the failure to inform the defendant of the actual maximum sentence he faces is always harmless error. I do not believe that is the law, nor do I believe that is what Johnson holds.1 Accordingly, I would remand so that Pierce could receive another Rule 11 hearing in which the district court would inform him of the actual statutory maximum sentence of 38 years. This would enable Pierce to enter a voluntary plea within the plain meaning of *795Rule 11 and the unambiguous mandate of Supreme Court precedent.

. United States v. Johnson, 1 F.3d 296, 302 (5th Cir.1993), provides that our harmless error analysis must focus on:
[W]hether [the defendant’s] knowledge and comprehension of the full and correct information would have been likely to affect the defendant’s willingness to plead guilty.
This language correctly requires focus on the voluntary nature of the defendant’s decision at the time he enters his plea, i.e., on the information the defendant possessed when he pled guilty. Curiously, Johnson, at 298, further provides, that in determining the voluntariness of a plea we may consider the "sentence actually imposed” on the defendant although the sentence is always imposed sometime after the entry of the plea. Only in the rare instance in which the defendant knows of the actual sentence to be imposed prior to making his plea will the actual sentence inform the court about the defendant’s knowledge when he entered the plea. Johnson then states that we should consider the ultimate sentence to determine the validity of the plea when it is:
[Temporally relevant to the voluntary and un-coerced nature of the defendant's guilty plea, and to his knowledge and understanding of the nature of the charges against him and the consequences of his plea.
Id. (emphasis added).
With all due respect, I find this observation, especially the words "temporally relevant,” somewhat confusing, unless the words refer only to the time period before the defendant enters his plea. The actual sentence imposed, perhaps, could be relevant, but not temporally so, to the reasonableness of a projected guidelines range that the district court informed the defendant of at the Rule 11 hearing. Here, however, the district court did not inform Pierce of any projected guidelines range and thus, the actual sentence imposed cannot be relevant in any sense to the voluntariness of Pierce’s plea entered some months prior to the district court’s imposition of the actual sentence.