D'Arcangelo v. State
| Decision Date | 16 March 2012 |
| Docket Number | No. 2D10–1375.,2D10–1375. |
| Citation | 82 So.3d 1174 |
| Parties | Anthony D'ARCANGELO, Petitioner, v. STATE of Florida, Respondent. |
| Court | Florida District Court of Appeals |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Michael J. Minerva and Melissa Montle of Innocence Project of Florida, Inc., Tallahassee, for Petitioner.
Pamela Jo Bondi, Attorney General, Tallahassee, and Richard M. Fishkin, Assistant Attorney General, Tampa, for Respondent.
ON MOTION FOR REHEARING
Upon consideration of Respondent's motion for clarification and/or rehearing, rehearing is granted and this court's opinion dated April 13, 2011, is withdrawn. The attached opinion is substituted therefor.
No further motions for rehearing or clarification will be entertained.
In this unusual case, Anthony D'Arcangelo seeks certiorari review of the circuit court's order denying his motion to determine his competency and to stay proceedings on his motion for postconviction relief. We previously granted D'Arcangelo's petition, but the State filed a timely motion for rehearing in which it made a concession that renders D'Arcangelo's petition moot. For that reason, we withdraw our previous opinion and we now deny D'Arcangelo's petition.
In 1982, a jury in Tampa convicted D'Arcangelo of two counts of first-degree murder. The State endeavored to have him sentenced to death, but the penalty-phase jurors split evenly on the question. The trial court concluded that the appropriate punishment was life imprisonment, and it imposed that sentence.
At D'Arcangelo's guilt-phase trial, the State had presented testimony from an FBI agent that he performed a comparative bullet lead analysis (CBLA), comparing bullets recovered from the crime scene with unspent bullets discovered at D'Arcangelo's residence. The agent found an association between the bullets from the two locations. He testified that “the bullets came from the same box of ammunition or another box of ammunition having the same composition.”
Many years later, in August 2008, an FBI laboratory director sent a letter to the Thirteenth Circuit State Attorney advising that the agent's expert trial testimony overstated the significance of his conclusions. Based on this newly discovered information, D'Arcangelo filed a pro se motion for postconviction relief pursuant to Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.850. Some months later, he obtained legal counsel, who filed an amended motion.
D'Arcangelo claimed that the CBLA testimony was the only evidence that physically linked him to the crime and that, at the time of trial, neither he nor his attorney could have discovered that this evidence was unreliable. He asserted that if the discredited evidence had not been admitted, he likely would have been acquitted. D'Arcangelo asked the postconviction court to vacate his conviction and sentence and to grant him a new trial. Cf. Murphy v. State, 24 So.3d 1220 (Fla. 2d DCA 2009) (); Smith v. State, 23 So.3d 1277 (Fla. 2d DCA 2010) (same).
In late 2009, D'Arcangelo's attorney began to suspect that her client was incompetent, and she hired an expert to examine him. The expert confirmed counsel's suspicions. Counsel then filed a simple motion seeking a stay of the rule 3.850 proceedings until resolution of D'Arcangelo's mental status. The motion asserted that there was a substantial issue regarding D'Arcangelo's competence and that due process required that he be competent during the postconviction process. The court denied the motion, relying on Carter v. State, 706 So.2d 873 (Fla.1997), for the proposition that in postconviction proceedings a defendant's competence is necessary only when a factual matter is at issue or when the development of such an issue would require the defendant's input. In its ruling, the court limited its focus to the question raised by D'Arcangelo's rule 3.850 motion, i.e., whether the newly discovered evidence discrediting the CBLA analysis would have resulted in a different outcome at trial, and it determined that the motion presented a legal issue, not a factual one.
Counsel thereafter filed another motion again seeking a stay and also requesting a competency hearing. But this time the motion described the quandary that D'Arcangelo could face. The motion asserted that case law bearing on whether D'Arcangelo could be exposed to the death penalty after a retrial was not consistent. Compare Bullington v. Missouri, 451 U.S. 430, 101 S.Ct. 1852, 68 L.Ed.2d 270 (1981) (); and Arizona v. Rumsey, 467 U.S. 203, 104 S.Ct. 2305, 81 L.Ed.2d 164 (1984) (), with Sattazahn v. Pennsylvania, 537 U.S. 101, 123 S.Ct. 732, 154 L.Ed.2d 588 (2003) (). Thus, the motion argued, D'Arcangelo had a factual decision to make: Should he proceed with his rule 3.850 motion and potentially expose himself to the death penalty? Or should he play it safe, withdraw his challenge concerning the CBLA testing, and spend the rest of his life in prison? The court again denied the motion.
D'Arcangelo filed a timely petition for a writ of certiorari seeking to quash the postconviction court's order. See State v. Ayala, 604 So.2d 1275 (Fla. 4th DCA 1992). We stayed the proceedings on his motion for postconviction relief pending the disposition of the certiorari petition.
We disagree with the circuit court's reasoning behind its decision to deny D'Arcangelo's motion. The circuit court relied on Carter, in which the supreme court established procedures addressing the incompetence of death-sentenced defendants in postconviction cases. See Carter, 706 So.2d at 876. Those procedures are now incorporated in Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.851(g). It provides that a “death-sentenced prisoner pursuing collateral relief under this rule who is found by the court to be mentally incompetent shall not be proceeded against if there are factual matters at issue, the development or resolution of which require the prisoner's input.” Fla. R.Crim. P. 3.851(g)(1). A competency hearing is required if “there are reasonable grounds to believe that a death-sentenced prisoner is incompetent to proceed and that factual matters are at issue.” Fla. R.Crim. P. 3.851(g)(3).
Carter is, indeed, instructive, but it does not directly control this case. Carter applies to incompetent death-sentenced prisoners only, as does rule 3.851. And as the Carter court noted, its purpose was to further society's interest in the proper imposition of the death penalty while insuring a proper and timely resolution of postconviction proceedings. 706 So.2d at 877. Rule 3.850, applicable in postconviction proceedings by prisoners who, like D'Arcangelo, are not sentenced to death, contains no incompetency procedures comparable to those set forth in rule 3.851.
Even so, we note that Florida jurisprudence has long held that every individual has a natural right to due process, which embodies a fundamental conception of fairness. See Jones v. State, 740 So.2d 520, 523 (Fla.1999). In Luckey v. State, 979 So.2d 353 (Fla. 5th DCA 2008), a case involving a prisoner not sentenced to death, the postconviction court denied a rule 3.850 claim even though the prisoner exhibited signs of incompetence at the evidentiary hearing on his claim. The Fifth District reversed the denial of the claim, noting that although Carter was limited to death-sentenced defendants, basic due process considerations such as notice and an opportunity to be heard required a postconviction court to address a prisoner's mental competence before proceeding with an evidentiary hearing. Id. at 356.
Luckey was consistent with Carter in one respect that is not as apparent in D'Arcangelo's case: Luckey involved an evidentiary hearing on the factual issue of whether Luckey's trial counsel had been ineffective by allegedly failing to warn him that he faced a term of life imprisonment as a prison releasee reoffender if he rejected the State's fifteen-year plea offer. In other words, Luckey fell neatly on the “factual issue” side of the factual-legal dichotomy drawn by the Carter court when it extended to death-sentenced postconviction petitioners the right to be competent only in proceedings involving factual issues.
In D'Arcangelo's petition for writ of certiorari, his counsel maintained that the decision whether to further pursue his rule 3.850 petition and possibly expose himself to the death penalty was a factual issue for purposes of Carter. We are tempted to agree—such a question certainly would not present a legal issue to be decided by the postconviction court. But it is apparent that when outlining the right to be competent in capital postconviction proceedings, the Carter court had in mind factual matters “at issue,” i.e., fact issues to be determined by the postconviction court based on evidentiary presentations.1
But even if D'Arcangelo's dilemma does not fit squarely within the fact-at-issue limitation, there is reason to believe that the limitation would not, or should not, apply to his case. As mentioned, Carter was premised in part on the court's goal of “furthering society's interest in the proper imposition of the death sentence while at the same time promoting the timely commencement and resolution of postconviction...
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...be life. (See this case for discussion of defendant’s competency to proceed on a post-conviction relief motion.) D’Arcangelo v. State, 82 So. 3d 1174 (Fla. 2d DCA 2012) In summarily denying a 3.850 motion, the court can attach only things that are part of the court record to show that defen......