Where Record as a Whole, Including Evidence Admitted in Addition to Defendant’s Admissions, Supports Factual Basis for Plea, the Plea is Valid

Lussier v. State, Minn.S.Ct., 10/10/2012.  Back in 2003 Mr. Lussier stabbed his wife to death; he plead guilty to first degree murder and received a life with possibility of release sentence.  He did not appeal.  More recently, Mr. Lussier filed a petition for post conviction relief in which he alleged that his guilty plea lacked a sufficient factual basis.  No one, it seems, paid the least bit of attention.  The state didn’t file a response in the post conviction court, the court denied the petition without a hearing, and the state blew off participating in Mr. Lussier’s appeal.  Justice Page at least wrote an opinion.

Who said, for a six member court – Justice Wright not having been a member of the court when the appeal came up – that the petition lacked substantive merit.  But that’s not what the case is about.  Rather, the court wanted to talk about a limitations question, and about just what a trial court can rely upon to find a sufficient factual basis to support the plea.

Limitations.  The court repeated what’s it’s said before that a request to withdraw a guilty plea under Rule 15.05, subd. 1 must be raised in a petition for post conviction relief.  A motion under Rule 15.05, subd. 1 has to be a timely one.  And, that motion, when made after sentencing, must be raised in a post conviction petition.  James v. State, 699 N.W.2d 723 (Minn. 2005).  Because the court had decided James before the enactment of the limitations restrictions in the post conviction statute, there had been no ruling whether that limitations restriction applied.  The court says that it does, so Mr. Lussier’s petition was untimely.  That meant that he had to meet one of the exceptions.   The only exception to the two year limitations period in play here was the 4(b)(5) exception, not frivolous and in the interests of justice. 

That gets us to the second issue, what can the trial court rely upon to support the plea.  The heart of Mr. Lussier’s argument about the guilty plea was that he didn’t make the requisite admissions to support it.  At the plea hearing, the state introduced, without objection, a transcript of the grand jury hearing.  The trial court relied upon that transcript, in addition to Mr. Lussier’s answers to questions, to find a sufficient factual basis to support the plea.  Justice Page is pretty generous about what the trial court can rely upon to find an adequate factual basis; it’s not’s just about a defendant’s admissions.  So long as the record as a whole contains sufficient evidence to support the conviction it’s a valid plea.  Indeed, the plea petition and colloquy may properly be supplemented by other evidence – written statements of witnesses as exhibits, the complaint, even (but discouraged) the presentence investigation report, the grand jury transcript – to support the plea.  The requirement for a factual basis is satisfied:

[I]f the record contains a showing that there is credible evidence available which would support a jury verdict that defendant is guilty of at least as great a crime as that to which he pled guilty.

State v. Genereux, 272 N.W.2d 33 (Minn. 1978).  The court’s analysis uses language that most usually only shows up in discussions of Alford pleas, so the court seems to be enlarging the strike zone for calling a plea valid.  Pleading guilty may be about acknowledging responsibility, but it’s also about making rational choices.