Yde v. State
| Decision Date | 04 August 1977 |
| Parties | James Donald YDE, a/k/a James D. Edwards, a/k/a James Donald Edwards v. STATE of Maine and Clerk of Superior Court, Cumberland County. |
| Court | Maine Supreme Court |
Paula H. Elkins, Cape Elizabeth, for plaintiff.
Leon V. Walker, Jr., Asst. Atty. Gen., Augusta, Peter Ballou, Deputy Dist. Atty., Portland, for defendants.
Before DUFRESNE, C. J., and POMEROY, WERNICK, ARCHIBALD and DELAHANTY, JJ.
This action for post-conviction relief is before us on report. We hold that James Donald Yde's petition for a writ of habeas corpus must be dismissed.
On January 10, 1975, 1 Yde filed a document in the Superior Court (Cumberland County) entitled "Writ of Mandamus" seeking the "expungement" from his "criminal arrest record" of two convictions obtained pursuant to guilty pleas entered by him in that court in September, 1952. 2 The writ named Cumberland County and the City of Portland as "respondents." The action was treated as a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, 14 M.R.S.A. §§ 5502-5508, and the case was assigned to a single Justice of this Court sitting in the Superior Court for hearing. Yde demonstrated his indigency and Maine counsel was appointed to represent him. The writ was subsequently amended with leave of the Court and styled "Amended Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus," with the State of Maine, the Clerk of the Cumberland County Superior Court, and the Chief of Police of the City of Portland, designated as respondents.
The petition asserts that Yde's incarceration in the federal penitentiary in Georgia is "in part" attributable to his two convictions in Maine in 1952. 3 It is alleged that those two convictions are "illegal and imposed in violation of the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Maine in that Petitioner was denied his right to counsel," and that "there is no record that Petitioner's guilty pleas were knowingly and intelligently made." The petitioner requests, inter alia, that his Maine convictions "be declared null and void and unconstitutional."
The State moved to dismiss the petition, arguing (1) that "(i)t fails to allege valid facts upon which relief can be granted," (2) that "(t)he Court lacks jurisdiction over the subject matter of this action," and (3) that "(t) he Court lacks jurisdiction over the petitioner."
With the case in this posture, the Justice, with the assent of the parties, ordered the action reported to the Law Court in accordance with M.R.Civ.P. 72. 4 The record on report includes the pleadings and motions which were filed below, and an agreed statement of facts prepared by the parties.
We conclude that the Maine courts are without jurisdiction to entertain this petition, on the ground that Yde, who concedes that he has been fully discharged from any sentences imposed on him by the State of Maine, does not qualify under 14 M.R.S.A. § 5502 as
(a) person convicted of a crime and incarcerated thereunder including any person committed as a juvenile offender, or released on probation, or paroled from a sentence thereof, or fined . . . .
In Green v. State, Me., 237 A.2d 409 (1968), we had occasion to consider a petition for post-conviction relief brought by a petitioner who, upon his conviction of larceny in Knox County in 1949, was sentenced, in accordance with a then-existent Maine "recidivist" statute, R.S. 1944 ch. 136, § 3, to a term of twelve to twenty-four years in the Maine State Prison. Had it not been for the fact that Green had previously been convicted of robbery in Maine in 1943, 5 the maximum sentence that he could have received for the 1949 larceny conviction would have been five years. We held that Green met the jurisdictional requirement of § 5502, and that the Superior Court could properly consider his challenge to the constitutionality of the 1943 conviction, adopting the petitioner's argument that "(T)he sentence he is now serving (is) directly attributable to the enhancement of the larceny conviction by application of the recidivist statute." Id. at 411.
Green was followed by Thoresen v. State, Me., 239 A.2d 654 (1968), in which we were presented with a petition for a writ of habeas corpus from a petitioner who had been convicted of larceny in Maine in 1959 and placed on probation for a period of two years. The probation was judicially terminated in 1961. In 1967 Thoresen was indicted in a United States District Court in California for an alleged violation of a federal statute. An element of the federal crime with which he was charged was that he was a person previously convicted in another state (Maine) of a crime punishable by a prison term of more than one year. Thoresen commenced his post-conviction attack on his 1959 Maine conviction while he was under the federal indictment.
We construed § 5502 as requiring the dismissal of Thoresen's petition, concluding that he was "a petitioner who admittedly is under no form of restraint in Maine.'' Id. at 655. In so ruling, we distinguished Green in the following terms:
(I)n Green there was the presently existing restraint in Maine which the post-conviction habeas corpus statute in clear and unambiguous terms requires as a prerequisite to relief. The absence of any form of continuing restraint in the instant case is fatal to the petitioner's claim.
In Staples v. State, Me., 274 A.2d 715 (1971), we expressly declined to overrule Thoresen and reiterated our view that Maine post-conviction relief is available only "when the petitioner is under some form of restraint, actual or technical, under Maine law." Id. at 716. We accordingly held that a petition for a writ of habeas corpus brought by a petitioner confined in the Nevada State Prison as a result of his felony conviction in that State was correctly dismissed, notwithstanding that, under Nevada law, the petitioner would have been eligible for parole had it not been for the fact that he had two prior felony convictions in Maine 6 which, in conjunction with the Nevada conviction and one other, caused him to be placed in a less favorable parole status.
Yde posits that his case is controlled by Green, rather than Thoresen and Staples. We are unimpressed with this argument. In Green, the petitioner was plainly "under some form of restraint . . . under Maine law," Staples, supra, insofar as the sentence he was serving was one imposed by a Maine court pursuant to a Maine recidivist statute. In Thoresen and Staples, by contrast, neither petitioner was under any sort of restraint imposed by Maine law: Thoresen was under federal indictment in California, and Staples was incarcerated in Nevada as a consequence of his felony conviction in that state.
Yde, like Thoresen and Staples, has executed any sentences which were imposed on him by the State of Maine. He is under no form of restraint under Maine law. The bare fact that a federal judge in Tennessee allegedly took Yde's prior criminal record, including two Maine convictions, into account in sentencing Yde to federal prison, does not entitle Yde to post-conviction relief in Maine. 7 The petitioner has not met the jurisdictional prerequisite of § 5502, and we conclude that his petition must be dismissed.
The entry must be
Appeal dismissed.
I concur with the opinion of Mr. Justice Delahanty, but in view of the dissents I feel it appropriate to specify my reason for so doing.
My reading of the dissents leads me to conclude that neither has any disagreement with the result reached by Mr. Justice Delahanty if Thoresen v. State, 239 A.2d 654 (Me. 1968), has continuing vitality. Otherwise stated, both the dissenters would appear to agree that the result reached by the majority opinion is mandated unless Thoresen is expressly overruled.
If the above understanding is correct, I fail to see the significance in the dissents involving Staples v. State, 274 A.2d 715 (Me. 1971). Staples added nothing to the interpretation of 14 M.R.S.A. § 5502 beyond that already given in Thoresen. I gather that the dissenters would have reached the same result if Staples had never been written.
In my opinion, the minority has overlooked a basic rule of statutory construction or, at least, has failed to acknowledge its existence, in their zeal to leave Thoresen vulnerable to a subsequent possibility of being overruled by a court composed of more than five Justices.
In Davies v. City of Bath, 364 A.2d 1269 (Me. 1976), we overruled the doctrine of governmental immunity but carefully noted that in so doing we were abandoning a rule that had come into being by virtue of a judicial fiat and not through legislative action. We held that if "past judicial doctrines" are no longer efficacious, we should not be bound by the "constraints of stare decisis."
In the present case, however, we are not concerned with "past judicial doctrines" but are dealing with past statutory construction. I believe this distinction is critical.
In State v. Pratt, 151 Me. 236, 237-38, 116 A.2d 924, 925 (1955), where the State urged that the Court adopt a broader statutory interpretation than that previously given, it was held:
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McMannis v. State
...See Noll v. People of State of Neb., supra, 537 F.2d at 969-70. State decisions favoring the approach we have taken include Yde v. State, 376 A.2d 465 (Me.1977) and State v. Theoharopoulos, 72 Wis.2d 327, 240 N.W.2d 635 (1976). In Yde, the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine held that post-conv......