People v. Seeber

• Court: New York Court of Appeals
• Citation: 793 N.Y.S.2d 826,4 N.Y.3d 780,826 N.E.2d 797
• Decision Date: 17 February 2005
• Parties: THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, Respondent, v. KATHERINE M. SEEBER, Appellant.

4 N.Y.3d 780
826 N.E.2d 797
793 N.Y.S.2d 826

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, Respondent,
v.
KATHERINE M. SEEBER, Appellant

Court of Appeals of the State of New York.

Argued January 13, 2005.

Decided February 17, 2005.

Eugene P. Grimmick, Troy, for appellant.

James A. Murphy, III, District Attorney, Ballston Spa (Nicholas E. Tishler of counsel), for respondent.

Chief Judge KAYE and Judges CIPARICK, ROSENBLATT, GRAFFEO and READ concur; Judge R.S. SMITH dissents and votes to reverse in an opinion in which Judge G.B. SMITH concurs.

OPINION OF THE COURT

MEMORANDUM.

The order of the Appellate Division should be affirmed.

County Court did not abuse its discretion by denying defendant's motion to withdraw her negotiated guilty plea to second-degree felony murder. Nothing in the record of the plea allocution called into question the voluntary, knowing and intelligent nature of defendant's bargained-for plea (see People v Alexander, 97 NY2d 482, 485 [2002] ["Trial judges are vested with discretion in deciding plea withdrawal motions because they are best able to determine whether a plea is entered voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently"]). Defendant entered her plea after detailed cautionary warnings from County Court and

4 N.Y.3d 781

extensive consultation with her counsel. In defendant's motion to withdraw her plea, made only after a jury acquitted her codefendant against whom she had agreed to testify, she neither asserted innocence nor intimated that she received less than effective assistance from counsel (compare id.)

Focusing solely on an isolated portion of her allocution, defendant now claims that an element of the pleaded-to offense — that she had committed the burglary underlying the felony murder charge by "remain[ing] unlawfully" — was not established. In response to a question from the prosecutor, however, defendant expressly acknowledged having remained unlawfully.¹

In any event, we have never held that a plea is effective only if a defendant acknowledges committing every element of the pleaded-to offense (see People v Lopez, 71 NY2d 662, 666 n 2 [1988]), or provides a factual exposition for each element of the pleaded-to offense (compare People v Nixon, 21 NY2d 338, 350 [1967], cert denied sub nom. Robinson v New York, 393 US 1067 [1969]; see also People v Moore, 71 NY2d 1002, 1005 [1988]). Indeed, "we have said repeatedly that there is no requirement for a uniform mandatory catechism of pleading defendants" (People v Fiumefreddo, 82 NY2d 536, 543 [1993] [internal citations and quotation marks omitted]). Because nothing that defendant said or failed to say in her allocution negated any element of the offense to which she pleaded (see People v Lopez, 71 NY2d at 666 n 2) or otherwise called into question her admitted guilt² or the voluntariness of her plea, she provided County Court with no basis for allowing the plea's withdrawal (compare

4 N.Y.3d 782

People v Ramos, 63 NY2d 640, 642-643 [1984] [when considering motion to withdraw a guilty plea, "the Judge to whom the motion to vacate is addressed should be entitled to rely on the record before him in order to insure that guilty pleas are accorded finality whenever possible"])

R.S. SMITH, J. (dissenting).

Except in the rare case of an Alford plea (North Carolina v Alford, 400 US 25 [1970]), a guilty plea should not be accepted unless the defendant admits that he or she is actually guilty of the offense charged. To decide whether defendant has made such an admission, an allocution should be read with the aid of common sense, and without dwelling unduly on technicalities (People v Lopez, 71 NY2d 662, 666 n 2 [1988]; People v Nixon, 21 NY2d 338 [1967]). Often, as in Nixon and several of the cases decided with it, this rule will lead courts to uphold guilty pleas, even where the allocution is tainted by a minor omission, or a trace of equivocation.

This case, in my view, presents the reverse situation: I think it is quite clear, from a commonsense reading of this plea allocution, that defendant did not admit to committing felony murder. Indeed, the record indicates that she did not commit that crime, though she may well have committed intentional murder (to which she did not plead guilty). Here a hyper-technical reading of the plea allocution is being used not to invalidate the plea but to rescue it from invalidity.

The crime to which defendant's plea related was a violation of Penal Law § 125.25 (3), the felony murder statute, which applies where defendant has caused the death of another person...