United States v. Higdon

496 A.2d 618, 1985 D.C. App. LEXIS 456
CourtDistrict of Columbia Court of Appeals
DecidedAugust 12, 1985
Docket84-1050
StatusPublished
Cited by10 cases

This text of 496 A.2d 618 (United States v. Higdon) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District of Columbia Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Higdon, 496 A.2d 618, 1985 D.C. App. LEXIS 456 (D.C. 1985).

Opinion

PER CURIAM:

The government appeals from the trial court’s order granting appellee’s petition for a writ of error coram nobis and vacating his sentence for second-degree burglary. We reverse. 1

I

Appellee pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree burglary, and was sentenced by Judge Murphy, on August 15, 1983, to a term of one to three years in prison. This sentence was to run consecutively to an eight-year term of imprisonment imposed by the Arlington, Virginia, County Circuit Court, for certain prior offenses.

On December 8, 1983, 115 days after sentencing, appellee filed a motion for re *619 duction of sentence pursuant to Super.Ct. Crim.R. 35(b). On December 19, Judge Murphy denied appellee’s motion on the merits. 2

Appellee was paroled from the Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Corrections in March 1984, and immediately began serving his District of Columbia sentence at the Lorton Correctional Facility. Thereafter, appellee filed a petition for a writ of error coram nobis to have his sentence vacated. Appellant alleged that his sentence was improper because,

no mitigating evidence [was] presented to the Court at sentencing, [and therefore] the Court was prevented from considering any relevant and crucial information in imposing sentence other than the presentence report.

In support of his petition, appellee included a proposed sentencing plan prepared by the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA). This plan contained information about appellee including his school records, his District of Columbia and Virginia presenteiice reports, the charging documents in this case, a list of mitigating factors to be considered in sentencing, other relevant research on issues pertaining to the case, and a proposed sentence.

Although a copy of appellee’s petition was served on the government on May 9, 1984, 3 the government did not file a timely response to the petition. 4 A representative of the United States Attorney’s Office was present at the scheduled hearing on the petition, on June 15, 1984, but was not familiar with appellee’s case, and did not participate in the hearing in any meaningful way. Following the hearing, Judge Murphy granted appellee’s petition for writ of error coram nobis, and set aside the previously imposed sentence. Judge Murphy then resentenced appellee to one to three years imprisonment, but placed appel-lee on two years probation with a requirement of 200 hours of community service.

Thereafter, the government filed a motion for reconsideration of the June 15 decision. The trial court denied the government’s motion on the grounds that the government’s inaction with respect to ap-pellee’s petition constituted “plain neglect,” and that in light of the government’s failure to oppose appellee’s petition, the court had treated the petition as “conceded.” This appeal followed.

II

A writ of error coram nobis is an “extraordinary remedy” which should be granted “only under circumstances compelling such action to achieve justice.” United States v. Morgan, 346 U.S. 502, 511, 74 S.Ct. 247, 252, 98 L.Ed. 248 (1954). At common law, the function of such a writ was to “correct errors of fact on the part of the trial court, not attributable to the negligence of the defendant, when the errors alleged [were] ‘of the most fundamental character; that is, such as rendered the proceeding itself irregular and invalid.’ ” Moon v. United States, 106 U.S.App.D.C. 301, 303, 272 F.2d 530, 532 (1959) (quoting United States v. Mayer, 235 U.S. 55, 69, 35 S.Ct. 16, 19, 59 L.Ed. 129 (1914)). The writ was intended to correct errors of fact not apparent on the face of the record and unknown to the trial court. Id. at 303, 272 F.2d at 532; see Watwood v. District of Columbia, 162 A.2d 486, 487 (D.C.1960). In reviewing a petition for such a writ, there is a presumption that the proceeding in question was without error, and the peti *620 tioner bears the burden of showing otherwise. Id. at 487.

We have reviewed the record in this case and do not believe that appellee carried his burden of showing that an error amounting to a “miscarriage of justice,” Moon v. United States, supra, 106 U.S.App.D.C. at 303, 272 F.2d at 532, occurred at his sentencing hearing. Thus, we conclude that the trial court abused its discretion in granting appellee’s petition for relief.

In his petition, appellee maintained that his sentencing hearing was fatally flawed because his counsel failed to set forth “mitigating factors” for the trial court’s consideration, and failed to have witnesses testify on appellee’s behalf at the hearing. Appel-lee argued that if this information had been available to the court before or at sentencing, the court would not have imposed the sentence that it did. We find appellee’s contentions without merit, because first, evidence of the mitigating factors, highlighted in the Memorandum of Points and Authorities accompanying appellee’s petition for the writ of error coram nobis, were before the court at the time of the sentencing hearing; and second, in any event, appellee’s contentions amounted to a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, which must properly be pursued under D.C.Code § 23-110 (1981), and not under a writ of error eoram nobis.

Upon reviewing both the presentence report and the NCI A study, we are hard pressed to find any significant mitigating evidence which is present in the latter but not the former. The mitigating factors set forth in the presentence report included a stable home environment with close family ties; no history of drug or alcohol abuse; and limited prior criminal involvement. The NCI A study emphasized these very same factors. The study’s only additions were references to the positive institutional adjustment appellee made while incarcerated in Virginia, and the non-violent nature of appellee’s offenses (a factor that the trial court was obviously aware of at the time of sentencing).

Moreover, Judge Murphy’s remarks during the August 15 sentencing hearing make clear that the court took mitigating factors into consideration in sentencing appellee. Judge Murphy stated:

You plead guilty. I’ll give you a break because of that but you committed a crime in this town so you owe us some— some of your time. The Court sentences you to one to three years.... You’ve got a — you’re a young man. You went off on a life of crime. You weren’t very good at it ’cause you ultimately got caught.

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Bluebook (online)
496 A.2d 618, 1985 D.C. App. LEXIS 456, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-higdon-dc-1985.