Hunter v. Fogg
| Decision Date | 02 May 1979 |
| Docket Number | No. 78 Civ. 5834 (CHT).,78 Civ. 5834 (CHT). |
| Parties | Vincent HUNTER, Petitioner, v. Walter FOGG, Superintendent of Eastern Correctional Facility, Respondent. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York |
Vincent Hunter, pro se.
Robert Abrams, Atty. Gen. of the State of New York by Charles A. Bradley, Asst. Atty. Gen., New york City, for respondent.
Petitioner Vincent Hunter is currently a prisoner of the State of New York serving a five-to-ten-year sentence arising from his plea of guilty to first-degree manslaughter before Justice Burton S. Roberts in Supreme Court, New York County. Hunter had been indicted for murder, and the manslaughter charge was the result of a plea bargain that included the imposition of an agreed-upon sentence of zero to ten years. The five-year minimum was set by the New York State parole board which, pursuant to New York Corrections Law § 805(2), had unfettered discretion to set a minimum term where the sentencing judge had not done so.1
Hunter now claims that his plea was not voluntary and informed within the meaning of Kercheval v. United States, 274 U.S. 220, 223, 47 S.Ct. 582, 583, 71 L.Ed. 1009 (1927) (). He asserts that his attorney, Chester L. Mirsky, never told him about section 805(2) and the consequences thereof, and that the attorney actively misinformed him by stating that Hunter's minimum sentence would be one-third of the maximum. Mr. Mirsky has submitted an affirmation to the Court which confirms in many crucial respects Hunter's claim of sentencing misinformation. Mirsky states that at the time the crime was committed, Hunter had a record that included a prior felony conviction of a type that met the definition of "predicate felony" by the terms of New York Penal Law § 70.06. That statute contains graded sentencing norms based on the severity of the new felony, and it requires that the predicate felon serve one-half of the new sentence. Hunter was much concerned that this mandate would be applied to him. However, section 70.06 took effect on September 1, 1973, three days after Hunter killed his victim. Both his attorney and Justice Roberts assured Hunter that he could not be exposed to treatment as a predicate felon; that is, that he would not by that avenue be required to serve five years of the maximum ten imposed. Affirmation of Chester L. Mirsky, dated Jan. 24, 1978, ¶ 6 ("Mirsky Aff.") (originally submitted in People v. Hunter, Index No. 4047/74); June 14, 1976 Plea Minutes ("PM") at 19.
Mirsky also confirms that he never told Hunter of the parole board's authority to set a minimum sentence anywhere up to the maximum; indeed, he states that he "indicated to Hunter that one year would be the earliest possible eligibility date for parole," based on his erroneous understanding that the "minimum period of imprisonment that he might anticipate serving prior to parole consideration . . . was . . a period of one-third of the maximum term," and the fact that Hunter had already served over two years in jail awaiting the disposition of this and other cases, time which would be credited to Hunter on the new manslaughter plea. Mirsky Aff. ¶¶ 5, 6. Finally, Mirsky supports Hunter's contention that all through the plea negotiations he was especially concerned with the minimum time he would have to serve, and Mirsky opines that Hunter would not have pleaded guilty knowing that five years of jail time was a possible consequence of his plea.
Hunter supports his claim of an unconstitutional plea by citing two recent decisions of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In United Stated ex rel. Leeson v. Damon, 496 F.2d 718 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 954, 95 S.Ct. 216, 42 L.Ed.2d 172 (1974), the defendant sought to withdraw a guilty plea given in the misapprehension that his maximum sentence would be two-and-a-half years when, as a first offender under thirty years of age, he was also subject to a statute providing for a term of up to five years. The trial judge rejected the motion to withdraw the plea, characterizing the case as one of "unwarranted assurance by counsel, rather than a case of lack of knowledge of the consequences of the plea." Id. at 720. Applying the rule of Kercheval, supra, the federal panel found that Leeson's plea was invalid because it was "not knowing and . . . entered in ignorance of its direct consequences." Leeson, supra, 496 F.2d at 721.
That the same reasoning applies to sentencing minima as to maxima was settled in United States ex rel. Hill v. Ternullo, 510 F.2d 844 (2d Cir. 1975). There the defendant relied on statements by his attorney to the effect that the maximum time he could receive on his guilty plea was four years, and that with good behavior the defendant would be released after two-thirds of the minimum time. Both statements were erroneous. Citing Leeson, the Hill court restated the proposition that a plea of guilty is not deprived of the requisite intelligence and volition when it is influenced by an attorney's mistaken estimate of possible sentence, but that the plea may well be void where counsel has failed correctly to inform the defendant of statutory sentencing possibilities. The Hill court reasoned that knowledge of the minimum time to be served is not Id. at 847.2
The respondent argues that knowledge of the parole board's discretionary power to sentence is not the sort of statutory sentencing information that is requisite to an informed guilty plea, suggesting that imposition of sentence by a court is a function entirely separate from the activities of a parole board. The respondent reasons that prior to Hunter's appearance before the board and until the minimum was fixed, no one could "predict" what Hunter's minimum sentence would be, and, therefore, that Hunter's attorney was engaging in mere speculation when he told the petitioner that the minimum sentence would be one-third of the maximum. Finally, the respondent seeks to distinguish Leeson and Hill by reciting that the former deals with maximum prison terms and the latter deals with statutory minimums, an analysis that ignores both the jurisprudential significance of Leeson and Hill and the fact that the parole board's sentencing authority is statutory.
The respondent relies on Dioguardi v. United States, 587 F.2d 572 (2d Cir. 1978), to support the theory that the activities of a court and those of a parole board are entirely separate and autonomous. The Court finds Dioguardi entirely inapposite here. There the federal prisoner had been denied parole under stringent guidelines promulgated after he was sentenced. He argued that the new criteria frustrated the intent of the sentencing judge who must have had the old guidelines in mind when he passed sentence. The court disagreed and refused to encroach on the federal Parole Commission's authority to grant or deny parole pursuant to its own rules, stating that the decision to grant or deny parole is not part of the sentencing process.
Clearly the grant or denial of parole is a matter entirely distinct from the state having vested in its parole board the authority to set the minimum sentence in lieu of the trial judge. The latter activity is patently part of the sentencing process and Hunter's challenge is not to the terms of the parole board's decision but to the validity of a plea purportedly taken in ignorance of the board's power to make that decision. It would violate both logic and justice to say that a defendant who pleads guilty to a judge-imposed minimum sentence is entitled to know before he pleads how much of that term he must in all events serve, but that the defendant whose minimum time will be set by the parole board is not similarly entitled to know that he takes his plea in the dark.
However, in spite of this Court's conclusion that Hunter had a right to accurate information about the exact scope of possible sentence, the fact that he received some misinformation and was uninformed of more is not dispositive of his claim.
The proper test for determining the constitutional validity of a state court guilty plea in the event of sentencing misinformation is whether the defendant was aware of actual sentencing possibilities, and, if not, whether accurate information would have made any difference in his decision to enter a plea.
Caputo v. Henderson, 541 F.2d 979, 984 (2d Cir. 1976); accord, Williams v. Smith, 591 F.2d 169 (2d Cir. 1979).
The first prong of the Caputo test requires the Court to assess whether Hunter had actual information about his exposure to the sentencing discretion of the parole board despite the fact that his attorney failed to inform him of it and misinformed him about a minimum sentence period. This Court has no reason to believe that Hunter was better informed than his attorney about matters of law, see Williams v. Smith, supra, 591 F.2d at 172. Moreover, the plea minutes reveal that Justice Roberts took great pains to put on the record that while Hunter could not be punished as a predicate offender for this homicide, his guilty plea to this crime would make him a predicate offender for a future felony and would then expose him to half the maximum sentence. Nowhere in the plea hearing was Hunter informed that the minimum sentence for this crime would be determined by the parole board, and nowhere was he told that he now risked — for all practical purposes — the same sentence as — or worse than — a predicate felon's.3
The second part of the Caputo test for constitutional validity of a guilty plea is whether accurate...
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Hunter v. Fogg
...2, 1979, the District Court (Charles H. Tenney, Judge) granted, without a hearing, Hunter's petition for habeas corpus. Hunter v. Fogg, 470 F.Supp. 1041 (S.D.N.Y.1979). Judge Tenney found that during the plea proceeding Hunter was not told that the Parole Board had discretionary authority t......
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