[align=left]
- 30 -
support the severe sanction of imprisonment. (emphasis supplied) (quoting Powell, 287 U.S. at 68-69)).
ii. Baldasar
Baldasar represented the United States Supreme Court`s attempt to apply Argersinger and Scott`s actual-imprisonment standard to an Illinois recidivism statute. Petitioner Baldasar had previously been convicted of misdemeanor theft.
See Baldasar, 446 U.S. at 222-23. In the prior proceeding, he was unrepresented and did not waive his right to counsel. See id. As punishment, he paid a fine of $159 and received a one-year probation sentence. See id. Six months later, Illinois charged him with stealing a $29 showerhead, which the State sought to prosecute as a felony based on Baldasar`s prior uncounseled misdemeanor conviction. See id.
The Illinois courts permitted the prosecution to introduce evidence of the prior uncounseled misdemeanor conviction to enhance Baldasar`s subsequent offense from a misdemeanor to a felony. See id. Baldasar objected, contending that this enhancement violated the rule of Argersinger and Scott. In other words, Illinois was increasing his punishment as a direct result of his prior uncounseled misdemeanor conviction and that uncounseled misdemeanor conviction, which was unreliable for the purpose of imposing imprisonment in the first instance, remained
- 31 -
unreliable for the purpose of enhancing his imprisonment in a collateral proceeding. See id. at 223-24.
A four-justice plurality12 agreed with Baldasar, while a four-justice dissent did not. See id. at 224 (Stewart, J., concurring, joined by Brennan and Stevens,
J.J.) ([P]etitioner . . . was sentenced to an increased term of imprisonment only because he had been convicted in a previous prosecution in which he had not had the assistance of appointed counsel in his defense. It seems clear to me that this prison sentence violated the constitutional rule of Scott.); id. at 227 (Marshall, J., concurring, joined by Brennan and Stevens, J.J.) (The sentence petitioner actually received would not have been authorized by statute but for the previous conviction.
It was imposed as a direct consequence of that uncounseled conviction and is therefore forbidden under Scott and Argersinger.); id. at 230-34 (Powell, J., dissenting, joined by Burger, C.J., White and Rehnquist, J.J.) (claiming that the
12. Justices Stewart and Marshall wrote separate concurrences in Baldasar because Justice Stewart endorsed Scott`s actual-imprisonment standard, while Justice Marshall continued to express disagreement with Scott, but accepted it as valid for purposes of writing his Baldasar concurrence. Thus, Justices Stewart and Marshall expressed very similar ideas, but Justice Marshall only accepted Scott`s validity for the sake of argument. Justices Brennan and Stevens joined both Stewart and Marshall`s concurrences. Consequently, a four-justice block existed, which agreed with the central premise that a conviction that is invalid for purposes of imposing imprisonment may not later be used collaterally to increase a defendant`s term of imprisonment for a subsequent offense. Compare Baldasar, 446 U.S. at 224 (Stewart, J., concurring, joined by Brennan and Stevens, J.J.), with id. at 225-29 (Marshall, J., concurring, joined by Brennan and Stevens, J.J.).
- 32 -
enhanced punishment Baldasar received was not imposed as a result of his prior misdemeanor, and thus did not violate Argersinger or Scott).
Justice Blackmun, meanwhile, developed his own approach without addressing the issue framed by the Court.13 Instead, he adopted a hybrid construct, which he lifted verbatim from his dissent in Scott. His approach combined Argersinger and Scott`s actual-imprisonment standard with a right-to-jury standard articulated by the Supreme Court in Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145 (1968).
Justice Blackmun, thus, offered the following rule in his concurrence:
[A]n indigent defendant in a state criminal case must be afforded appointed counsel whenever the defendant is prosecuted for a nonpetty criminal offense, that is, one punishable by more than six months` imprisonment, see Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145 (1968); Baldwin v. New York, 399 U.S. 66 (1970), or whenever the defendant is convicted of an offense and is actually subjected to a term of imprisonment, Argersinger v. Hamlin, 407 U.S. 25 (1972).
446 U.S. at 229 (Blackmun, J., concurring) (quoting Scott, 440 U.S. at 389-90 (Blackmun, J., dissenting)). This is the same rule that we adopted in Hlad v. State, 585 So. 2d 928, 929-30 (Fla. 1991).
13. The issue, as framed by the Court, presumed the validity of Scott`s actual-imprisonment standard. See Baldasar, 446 U.S. at 222 ([W]hether [an uncounseled misdemeanor] conviction may be used under an enhanced penalty statute to convert a subsequent misdemeanor into a felony with a prison term without violating the rule in Scott.). Justice Blackmun, however, dissented in Scott and expressed the same views in Baldasar. See id. at 229-30 (Blackmun, J., concurring); Scott, 440 U.S. at 389-90 (Blackmun, J., dissenting).
- 33 -
The most accurate description of Baldasar appears to be the one that Justice Souter later offered in Nichols: [T]he Baldasar Court was in equipoise, leaving a decision in the same posture as an affirmance by an equally divided Court, entitled to no precedential value. Nichols, 511 U.S. at 750 (Souter, J., concurring in the judgment). Cf. Marks v. United States, 430 U.S. 188, 193 (1977) ([W]hen a fragmented Court decides a case and no single rationale explaining the result enjoys the assent of five Justices, the holding of the Court may be viewed as that position taken by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds.` (as recognized by numerous courts, it is difficult to determine Baldasar`s narrowest grounds)). But see Kirsten M. Nelson, Note, Nichols v. United States and the Collateral Use of Uncounseled Misdemeanors in Sentence Enhancement, 37 B.C. L. Rev. 557, 582 (1996) (All three concurring opinions in Baldasar share one common and narrow reasoning: the deprivation of liberty cannot occur without the right to counsel. (footnote omitted)).
iii. Nichols' Contrast With the Sixth Amendment Reliability Concern
In 1994, the United States Supreme Court overruled Baldasar in Nichols v. United States. See Nichols, 511 U.S. at 748-49, overruling Baldasar, 446 U.S. at 222-23. In the process, the Court endorsed and adopted the Baldasar dissent as the Nichols majority opinion: [A]n uncounseled conviction valid under Scott [because no imprisonment was imposed] may be relied upon to enhance the
- 34 -
sentence for a subsequent offense, even though that sentence entails imprisonment. Nichols, 511 U.S. at 746-47 (emphasis supplied). Nichols` factual posture, however, differed from Baldasar in an important respect. While Baldasar involved a recidivism statute and the use of an uncounseled misdemeanor to enhance a subsequent offense from a misdemeanor to a felony, Nichols involved the consideration of a defendant`s prior uncounseled misdemeanor under the federal Sentencing Guidelines. Justice Souter addressed the importance of this factual distinction in his concurrence:
There is an obvious and serious argument that the line drawn in Scott is crossed when, as Justice Stewart put it in Baldasar, a defendant is sentenced [under a recidivism statute] to an increased term of imprisonment only because he had been convicted in a previous prosecution in which he had not had the assistance of appointed counsel in his defense.
Fortunately, the difficult constitutional question that argument raises need not be answered in deciding this case, for unlike the sentence-enhancement scheme involved in Baldasar, the United States Sentencing Commission`s Guidelines . . . do not provide for automatic enhancement based on prior uncounseled convictions. . . .
Under the Guidelines . . . the role prior convictions play in sentencing is presumptive, not conclusive, and a defendant has the chance to convince the sentencing court of the unreliability of any prior valid but uncounseled convictions . . . .
Nichols, 511 U.S. at 750-52 (Souter, J., concurring in the judgment) (citations omitted) (some emphasis supplied).
- 35 -
Therefore, Justice Souter contrasted the use of uncounseled misdemeanors under the federal Sentencing Guidelines with the use of such misdemeanors under recidivism statutes similar to the one at issue in this case:
Because the Guidelines allow a defendant to rebut the negative implication to which a prior uncounseled conviction gives rise, they do not ignore the risk of unreliability associated with such a conviction. . . . Where concern for reliability is accommodated, as it is under the Guidelines, nothing in the Sixth Amendment or our cases requires a sentencing court to ignore the fact of a valid uncounseled conviction, even if that conviction is a less confident indicator of guilt than a counseled one would be.
Id. at 752-53 (Souter, J., concurring in the judgment) (emphasis supplied). Hence, Justice Souter would limit the use of prior uncounseled misdemeanors to situations where [Argersinger`s] concern for reliability is accommodated. Id. at 753 (Souter, J., concurring in the judgment).14
The Nichols majority, however, did not address the Sixth Amendment reliability concern, which the Court has subsequently reaffirmed as the key Sixth Amendment inquiry. Alabama v. Shelton, 535 U.S. 654, 667 (2002) ([T]he key Sixth Amendment inquiry [is] whether the adjudication of guilt corresponding to
14. Such an approach would also be constitutionally required with regard to Florida`s Criminal Punishment Code. Cf. Fla. R. Crim. P. 3.704(d)(27) (authorizing the trial judge to depart downward for permissible reasons when memorialized in a contemporaneous writing, and referring to a non-exhaustive justification list appearing in section 921.0026(2), Florida Statutes). The inquiry remains whether the adjudications of guilt corresponding to the prior uncounseled convictions are sufficiently reliable to permit enhanced incarceration.
- 36 -
the prison sentence is sufficiently reliable to permit incarceration. (emphasis supplied)). Furthermore, in adopting the Baldasar dissent as the Nichols majority opinion, the High Court appears to have imported all of its attendant issues. For example, the Baldasar dissent and the Nichols majority opinion do not seem to logically follow from Argersinger and Scott. Argersinger and Scott held that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel in misdemeanor cases is limited to cases where the defendant is actually imprisoned, and they did so because of the lack of reliability associated with uncounseled misdemeanors. See Argersinger, 407 U.S. at 34-37 (outlining the reliability concerns associated with uncounseled misdemeanors); Scott, 440 U.S. at 373-74 (reaffirming Argersinger in toto). Thus, if an uncounseled misdemeanor is too unreliable to impose imprisonment in a direct proceeding, it remains too unreliable to enhance imprisonment in a collateral proceeding; the key issue remains its unreliability for purposes of imposing imprisonment.
In contrast, the Baldasar dissent and the Nichols majority opinion endorsed a somewhat incongruous rule that deems an uncounseled conviction invalid for imposing a prison term directly, but valid for imposing a prison term collaterally, which some justices have characterized as an illogical and unworkable deviation from [the Supreme Court`s] previous cases, and as not addressing the underlying Sixth Amendment reliability concern. Baldasar, 446 U.S. at 228-29 (Marshall, J.,
- 37 -
concurring) (referencing the Baldasar dissent, which became the position of the majority in Nichols).15
The justifications underpinning Nichols` Sentencing Guidelines rationale are unpersuasive when applied to a recidivism statute, under which the defendant`s prior misdemeanor convictions constitute an element of his or her later felony offense. The Baldasar dissent and the Nichols majority included dicta from an 1895 double jeopardy casewhich when used there made senseand proceeded to use it in a context for which it was perhaps ill-suited. See Baldasar, 446 U.S. at 232 (Powell, J., dissenting) (citing Moore v. Missouri, 159 U.S. 673, 677 (1895); Oyler v. Boles, 368 U.S. 448, 451 (1962) (reaffirming Moore in the context of an equal protection and due process challenge)); Nichols, 511 U.S. at 747 (exhibiting the same reasoning as the Baldasar dissent). In particular, the observation that the High Court has consistently . . . sustained repeat-offender laws as penalizing only the last offense committed by the defendant,16 makes sense when one is
15. See also Ralph Ruebner et al., Shaking the Foundations of Gideon: A Critique of Nichols in Overruling Baldasar v. Illinois, 25 Hofstra L. Rev. 507, 550- 51 (1996) (explaining how Nichols is inconsistent with prior United States Supreme Court right-to-counsel precedent).
16. Baldasar, 446 U.S. at 232 (Powell, J., dissenting) (emphasis supplied) (citing Moore v. Missouri, 159 U.S. 673, 677 (1895) (double jeopardy case--did not involve the right to counsel); Oyler v. Boles, 368 U.S. 448, 451 (1962) (equal protection and due process case--did not involve the right to counsel)); see also Nichols, 511 U.S. at 747.
- 38 -
determining whether a criminal defendant is being tried and punished for the same offense twice (i.e., a double-jeopardy violation), because at least one element of the subsequent offense differs from that of the previous offense(s).17 But, that reasoning does not seem to make sense in the context of a rule holding that, on the one hand, uncounseled misdemeanor convictions are unreliable and invalid for purposes of imposing imprisonment directly but, on the other, valid for imposing imprisonment collaterally. See Nichols, 511 U.S. at 746. Neither Moore nor Oyler addressed a violation of the right to counsel, and as noted by other courts
[q]uotations from cases, shorn of their factual context, are not much help in making a decision. United States v. Galindo-Gallegos, 244 F.3d 728, 730 (9th Cir. 2001).
Under a recidivism statute such as the one at issue in this case, the fact remains that the enhanced portion of the term of imprisonment would not have been imposed but for the previous conviction, and the uncounseled conviction should remain invalid for purposes of imposing imprisonment. See Baldasar, 446
U.S. at 227 (Marshall, J., concurring). It has been recognized that courts
should not lose sight of the underlying rationale of Argersinger, that unless an accused has the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him, his conviction is not sufficiently reliable
17. See, e.g., Blockburger v. United States, 284 U.S. 299, 304 (1932) (the Blockburger test asks whether an offense contains an element not contained in the other relevant offense, to determine whether a double-jeopardy violation has occurred).
- 39 -
to support the severe sanction of imprisonment. An uncounseled conviction does not become more reliable merely because the accused has been validly convicted of a subsequent offense.
Id. at 228-29 (Marshall, J., concurring) (citations omitted) (emphasis supplied) (quoting Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, 69 (1932))).
There are no principled means of separating the enhanced term of imprisonment from the uncounseled misdemeanor convictions when addressing a recidivism statute of the type at issue in this case; the defendant`s prior misdemeanor convictions are an element of the later felony offense, thus any enhanced imprisonment directly flows from the defendant`s prior convictions.
See, e.g., Finelli, 780 So. 2d at 33 (holding that a defendant`s prior misdemeanor DUI convictions are an element of his or her subsequent felony DUI offense).
Therefore, the adjudication of guilt corresponding to the [enhanced] prison sentence is [not] sufficiently reliable to permit incarceration. See Shelton, 535
U.S. at 667 (emphasis supplied) (holding that uncounseled suspended sentences violate Argersinger and Scott). When faced with this reality, we cannot apply dicta from federal cases to artificially separate the uncounseled misdemeanor from the defendant`s potentially much longer prison term because under a recidivism statute, the defendant is only serving the enhanced portion of his or her sentence because of an uncounseled conviction [that] is not sufficiently reliable to support the severe sanction of imprisonment. Baldasar, 446 U.S. at 227 (Marshall, J.,
- 40 -
concurring) (emphasis supplied). Therefore, we find Nichols unpersuasive in this context. We cannot agree with the rationale of the United States Supreme Court, which intimates that a repeat DUI offender is not receiving punishment for his or her prior uncounseled convictions. We come to this conclusion because proving those convictionsbeyond a reasonable doubtis part of the State`s burden in seeking to convict the defendant for his or her later felony offense. See, e.g., Finelli, 780 So. 2d at 33.
In sum, these prior uncounseled convictions are part of the defendant`s later felony offense because they are elements of that offense. Therefore, in a situation such as this, we decline to endorse any holding which would conclude that the recidivist defendant is not receiving punishment for his or her prior uncounseled convictions. Consequently, we hold that Nichols is not persuasive precedent for purposes of interpreting article I, section 16 of the Florida Constitution. In addition, under article I, sections 2 and 16 of the Florida Constitution, the Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure, and the Florida Statutes, we reaffirm that this state is a prospective-imprisonment jurisdiction and that indigent defendants possess an independent state-law constitutional right to appointed counsel during criminal prosecutions.
[/align]
رد مع اقتباس
المفضلات