Taylor v. State
| Docket Number | A-13686,2756 |
| Decision Date | 25 August 2023 |
| Parties | MATTHEW ALLEN TAYLOR, Appellant, v. STATE OF ALASKA, Appellant, Appellee. |
| Court | Alaska Court of Appeals |
Appeal from the Superior Court, Trial Court No. 4FA-17-01399 CR Fourth Judicial District, Fairbanks, Thomas I. Temple, Judge.
Renee McFarland, Assistant Public Defender, and Samantha Cherot Public Defender, Anchorage, for the Appellant.
Nancy R. Simel, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Criminal Appeals, Anchorage, and Treg R. Taylor, Attorney General Juneau, for the Appellee.
Before: Allard, Chief Judge, and Wollenberg and Terrell Judges.
Matthew Allen Taylor pleaded guilty, pursuant to a plea agreement, to first-degree failure to stop at the direction of a peace officer (felony eluding).[1] Taylor received 2 years to serve on this conviction. The plea agreement also required Taylor to plead guilty, in a separate case, to first-degree offering a false instrument for recording, for which he received an additional 2 years to serve.[2]
Taylor now appeals his conviction for felony eluding, arguing that his plea was involuntary because the trial court erroneously deprived him of his right to represent himself. For the reasons explained here, we conclude that the involuntariness of Taylor's plea cannot be litigated in this direct appeal and must instead be litigated through an application for post-conviction relief, where Taylor can move to withdraw his plea and the record can be properly supplemented.[3]
Factual background
In 2017, Taylor was arrested and charged with felony eluding and driving with a revoked license after he engaged in reckless driving during a high-speed chase with the police.[4] Taylor was appointed an attorney to represent him in this case.
At the time of his arrest, Taylor was on probation in multiple different felony cases. Following Taylor's arrest, the State filed petitions to revoke his probation in each of those cases. (Taylor was appointed a different attorney to represent him in those cases.)
On January 9, 2019, the parties convened for a change-of-plea hearing in the felony eluding case. However, the change-of-plea hearing was continued because Taylor had received new criminal charges in a separate case, including charges for forgery and offering a false instrument for recording. (Taylor was appointed yet another attorney in this new case.)
At the January hearing, Taylor requested a hearing because he wanted to represent himself. The court refused to schedule a representation hearing because the court apparently believed that the request for a representation hearing needed to come from the attorney. The court told Taylor to "talk to [his] attorney" and have the attorney file a written motion requesting a representation hearing. Taylor responded "no problem" and indicated he would file something. However, no request for a representation hearing was filed.
At the next hearing, on February 21, there was no mention of self-representation and no request for a representation hearing.
The following hearing took place on March 18. At that hearing, Taylor's attorney moved to withdraw, and Taylor told the court that he wanted to hire a new attorney but could not afford one. Taylor again requested a representation hearing. The court took the motion to withdraw under advisement and scheduled a subsequent hearing for March 28.
On March 28, the court held a representation and a pretrial hearing, but Taylor told the court at that hearing that he did not want to represent himself; instead, he told the court that he was hoping to hire another attorney to represent him. The court continued the case and explained that Taylor's attorney would remain appointed until a substitution of counsel was filed.
On July 9, the court held another representation hearing. At that hearing, Taylor initially told the court that he wanted to dismiss all of his attorneys in all of his cases and to represent himself. However, after the court advised Taylor of the advantages of having counsel and the disadvantages of self-representation, Taylor told the court that he did not want to represent himself. Taylor also said that he was ready to resolve his cases and accept the State's proposed plea agreement with "a minor adjustment." The court found that Taylor did not actually want to represent himself, and the court set Taylor's cases for a change-of-plea hearing.
At the change-of-plea hearing, however, it became clear that, although there was a resolution for Taylor's petitions to revoke probation, there was not an agreement on the 2017 felony eluding case or the 2019 forgery case. The court therefore set those two cases for a continued pretrial hearing, and it scheduled another representation hearing at Taylor's request.
On August 14, the court held the representation hearing, and Taylor told the court that he wanted to represent himself in the felony eluding case but he wanted to keep his lawyer in the forgery case. The court questioned Taylor about his charges and the underlying law. Taylor was able to tell the court about the charges and the sentencing ranges, but he was unable to identify the elements of felony eluding. Taylor explained that he had been in "the hole" while incarcerated and unable to do legal research. Taylor was clear that he did not want the lawyer in the felony eluding case to continue to represent him. The court subsequently denied Taylor's request to represent himself.
Approximately three weeks later, Taylor entered into a plea agreement on the felony eluding case and the forgery case. Under the terms of the plea agreement, Taylor pleaded guilty to felony eluding and offering a false instrument and received a composite sentence of 4 years to serve (2 years to serve, consecutively, on each conviction). The remaining charges were dismissed.
This appeal followed.
Why we conclude that Taylor cannot litigate on direct appeal from his guilty plea his claim that the superior court erroneously denied him the right to represent himself
Taylor raises a single issue on appeal: he argues that the trial court erred when it denied his requests to represent himself. As we are about to explain, Taylor cannot raise this issue for the first time in a direct appeal from his conviction. Instead, under Alaska Criminal Rule 11(h), he must first seek to withdraw his plea.
It is generally said that "a plea of guilty or nolo contendere is a waiver of all non-jurisdictional defects and forecloses appellate review."[5] This rule bars defendants who have pleaded guilty from arguing on appeal that the trial court made an erroneous legal ruling prior to their guilty plea, as Taylor seeks to do here. Taylor provides two arguments for why this rule should not apply to his case.
First, Taylor argues that the erroneous denial of the right to self-representation is a jurisdictional defect that can be raised anytime. Taylor, however, provides no support for this argument. Although this Court has acknowledged that the complete deprivation of the right to counsel is a jurisdictional defect,[6] Taylor does not cite any cases - from this jurisdiction or any other - holding that the erroneous denial of the right to self-representation is a jurisdictional defect. Nor is there anything about the nature of a self-representation claim that would make it jurisdictional.[7] We therefore reject this argument.
Second, Taylor argues that the court's denial of his request to represent himself rendered his plea involuntary. Taylor is correct that a claim that one's plea was involuntary is not barred by the forfeiture rule because that rule "has no application to defects which go directly to the guilty plea itself."[8] It would clearly be unfair and illogical to prohibit a defendant from challenging the voluntariness of their guilty plea on the grounds that they waived any such challenge by pleading guilty.
But although a defendant can challenge the voluntariness of their guilty plea, they usually cannot do so for the first time in a direct appeal. Rather, because evaluating whether the defendant's plea was voluntary typically requires further development of the record - specifically, of the circumstances surrounding the defendant's plea - a defendant claiming that their plea was involuntary must first file a motion to withdraw their plea under Criminal Rule 11(h).[9]
This concept was spelled out in two cases from the Alaska Supreme Court.
In the first, McKinnon v. State, the supreme court considered whether a defendant who had been denied the right to be represented by his counsel of choice could subsequently challenge the validity of his guilty plea.[10] The court ruled that the defendant could challenge his plea on appeal because "the voluntariness and reliability of such a plea is inherently suspect."[11]
But McKinnon was later clarified in a second case, Gordon v. State.[12] In Gordon, the defendant argued on direct appeal that his plea was involuntary and asserted that this argument was permitted by McKinnon. But as our supreme court wrote in Gordon, "[a]lthough the McKinnon language sanctions appellate review of the voluntariness of a plea, it does not authorize bringing such claims by direct appeal."[13]Rather, "McKinnon merely stands for the proposition that a guilty or nolo plea will not insulate the conviction from subsequent appellate review, if the issue is properly raised."[14] As the court explained in a footnote, the defendant in McKinnon "was appealing from the denial of his motion to withdraw his plea," not raising the issue in a direct appeal from his judgment of conviction.[15]
Taylor points to a Ninth Circuit case, United States v Hernandez, holding that defendants can challenge their guilty plea on direct appeal when...
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