People v. Seeber

826 N.E.2d 797, 4 N.Y.3d 780, 793 N.Y.S.2d 826, 2005 N.Y. LEXIS 176

Opinions

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 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 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”]).

1 . The dissent protests that defendant, a lay person, would not have understood what it meant to “remain unlawfully” in the sense of the burglary statute. This is supposition, an assertion without support in the record. Moreover, defense counsel, who presumably knew the technical legal meaning of “remain unlawfully,” advised and consulted with defendant throughout the plea proceeding. Indeed, after the prosecutor proposed asking defendant follow-up questions regarding the burglary underlying the indictment’s felony murder count, counsel requested time for an off-the-record discussion with defendant to fashion a question that “might satisfy” the prosecutor. When questioning resumed, the prosecutor posed only two questions, one of which dealt with remaining unlawfully. Defendant did not ask for the question to be repeated, as she had with a prior question. Nor did defendant request time to confer with counsel, which the trial court, in fact, offered her. After, as her counsel put it, “thinking” about the answer for a while, defendant instead unequivocally acknowledged that she had remained unlawfully.

2 . Contrary to the dissent’s suggestion, the plea was far from baseless. Indeed, defendant entered it after County Court denied her motion to suppress confessions that she had made to the police. In her confessions, defendant acknowledged knowing that codefendant intended to steal from her grandmother (a fact that she reiterated during the allocution), and also that codefendant had indeed taken money and jewelry from her grandmother’s home. Given the confessions, it is certainly understandable that the People charged defendant with several crimes, including felony murder occurring during either a burglary or a robbery. Additionally, the confessions, especially in conjunction with defendant’s allocution, provided a more than ample basis for County Court to be assured that defendant was not entering a plea to a crime that she did not commit. Her guilt was abundantly clear, and she profited from a plea that she wanted and negotiated.