A Defendant’s Ignorance of the Effect of a Plea on a Future Criminal Charge Does Not Make the Plea Unintelligent.

State v. Crump, Minn.Ct.App., 3/4/2013.  A Minneapolis police officer saw Mr. Crump speeding; the officer had first to chase Mr. Crump then ram his car to get him to stop.  This earned Mr. Crump a charge of fleeing a police officer in a motor vehicle.  Mr. Crump agreed to plead guilty to this offense in forbearance of a potential controlled substance charge, the drugs that he threw out the window during the chase. 

Now, it just so happened that police had arrested Mr. Crump a week or so before this chase/drugs arrest on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.  The state didn’t charge him with this DWI offense, however, until the day after he pled guilty to the fleeing charge.  This was apparently a felony DWI offense, so Mr. Crump wanted to withdraw his guilty plea to the fleeing in order to prevent a boost to his criminal history score in the event of a conviction on the DWI.  He said that he plea was not intelligently made because his attorney hadn’t told him that his fleeing plea would up his sentence on the DWI.  In fact, Mr. Crump said that he would never had entered the fleeing plea had he known this.

At the hearing on the motion to withdraw the plea defense counsel specifically let the prosecutor go on the question whether there was some charging manipulation going on up in the prosecutor’s office.  Whether this would make a difference remains to be seen. (Mr. Crump also did not make an ineffective assistance claim.) Instead, the court of appeals said that Mr. Crump’s ignorance of the potential consequences on other future criminal charges did not render the plea unintelligent, even though the other charge arose before the plea on the most recent charge.  Such consequences are speculative and, more importantly, are “collateral consequences” that neither the court nor defense counsel should have to warn Mr. Crump about.