Lee v. United States
| Citation | 257 A.3d 1023 |
| Decision Date | 26 August 2021 |
| Docket Number | No. 19-CM-1044,19-CM-1044 |
| Parties | Shelton R. LEE, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES, Appellee. |
| Court | Court of Appeals of Columbia District |
Montrell L. Scaife was on the brief for appellant.
Channing D. Phillips, United States Attorney, and Chrisellen R. Kolb, Elizabeth H. Danello, and Carlos A. Valdivia, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the brief for appellee.
Before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals on a Motion to Dismiss Appeal
Before Thompson and Deahl, Associate Judges, and Greene,* Senior Judge, Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
Shelton Lee entered an unconditional guilty plea to simple assault. As part of that plea agreement, he waived his right to appeal his conviction to this court. The trial court sentenced him to supervised probation with certain conditions, and he filed this appeal challenging one condition of his probation. But during the pendency of this appeal—after both parties filed their briefs and shortly before a scheduled oral argument—Mr. Lee died. The general rule is that when an appellant dies during the pendency of their direct appeal, we remand with instructions to vacate the convictions on appeal. Howell v. United States , 455 A.2d 1371, 1372 (D.C. 1983) (en banc). The parties now dispute whether that rule applies under these circumstances, given that Mr. Lee waived his right to appeal his conviction and did not in fact challenge his conviction in the brief he filed. We agree with the government that vacatur of Mr. Lee's conviction is not warranted in these circumstances. We dismiss this appeal and remand with instructions that the Superior Court vacate Mr. Lee's sentence, but leave his conviction intact.
Mr. Lee, a former school teacher, pled guilty to simple assault after slapping one of his 12-year-old students across the face with an open hand. He signed a plea form acknowledging that by pleading guilty he was "giv[ing] up [his] right to appeal [his] conviction to" this court, and the trial court confirmed in open court that he understood the consequences of his plea.
Following acceptance and entry of the guilty plea, the trial court sentenced Mr. Lee to 90 days’ incarceration, suspended, three years’ supervised probation with certain conditions, and imposed a $50.00 assessment under the Victims of Violent Crime Compensation Act of 1996. One of the special conditions of Mr. Lee's probation required him to disclose the fact of his conviction and some details regarding it to any prospective employer that would entrust him with teaching children under the age of eighteen. Mr. Lee then filed a notice of appeal indicating his intent to challenge "his sentence [as] unreasonably excessive," and his appellate brief challenged only the condition of probation mentioned above. The government filed a responsive brief defending the condition, Mr. Lee did not file a reply brief, and this court scheduled the appeal for oral argument.
The day before the oral argument was to take place, appellant's counsel notified the court that Mr. Lee had recently died and that a motion to dismiss the appeal was forthcoming. Counsel then filed a request that we dismiss the appeal and vacate Mr. Lee's conviction. The government opposes that request. It concedes that Mr. Lee's sentence should be vacated, but contends that his underlying conviction should remain, given that he waived his right to challenge his conviction and in fact did not challenge it on appeal.
As this court sitting en banc in Howell explained, if a "defendant dies before he has exhausted his right [to] appeal" his conviction, the standard "approach is to dismiss the appeal and remand the case to the lower court with directions to vacate the conviction and abate the prosecution by reason of death." 455 A.2d at 1372 ; accord United States v. DeMichael , 461 F.3d 414, 416 (3d Cir. 2006) (collecting cases). The principle animating this rule is that a direct appeal as a matter of right "is an integral part of our system for finally adjudicating [one's] guilt or innocence." Howell , 455 A.2d at 1373 (quoting United States v. Moehlenkamp , 557 F.2d 126, 128 (7th Cir. 1977) ). For that reason, "the interests of justice require that [a defendant] not stand convicted without resolution of the merits" of a pending direct appeal. Id.1
This case presents a gray area and an issue of first impression for this court. Although Mr. Lee died during the pendency of his direct appeal, he had already waived his right to challenge his conviction as part of his plea agreement and filed an appellate brief confirming he was contesting only a condition of his sentence, not the conviction itself. So, while his case was up on direct appeal in a technical sense, that appeal involved no attack on his conviction. It therefore cannot be said that Mr. Lee's appeal was an integral part of adjudicating his guilt or innocence in any respect. His guilt was established when he waived his right to challenge his conviction and then raised no challenge to the integrity of the plea itself by contesting only a condition of his sentence in his direct appeal. See Mitchell v. United States , 64 A.3d 154, 156 n.4 (D.C. 2013) (). Under those circumstances, the reasons that typically favor vacatur of convictions when an appellant dies during the pendency of their direct appeal would seem to apply only to the challenged sentence. As the government concedes Mr. Lee's sentence should be vacated, that is all we instruct the trial court to do.
We find support for our conclusion in the federal courts of appeals. The Second Circuit recently confronted a nearly identical situation in United States v. Mladen , 958 F.3d 156 (2d Cir. 2020). In Mladen , appellant entered a guilty plea, noted an appeal, filed an appellate brief "arguing only that there were substantive and procedural errors in connection with sentencing and that his sentence was unreasonable," and then died months after oral argument. Id. at 157. The Second Circuit acknowledged that convictions are "ordinarily" vacated when an appellant dies during the pendency of their direct appeal because "a defendant should not stand convicted if his guilt has not been resolved with finality." Id. at 160, 162. But it then explained that justification did not apply because appellant "ha[d] waived or forgone his right to appellate review of his guilt" by pleading guilty and then challenging only his sentence on appeal. Id. at 162. Under such circumstances, the court reasoned that appellant's conviction had "already become final and unappealable," thereby obviating "the primary rationale" for vacatur. Id. at 160, 162. The Third Circuit reached the same result in United States v. DeMichael , where again the defendant pled...
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