Counsel's Misinformation About Consequences of Plea Is Not a Manifest Injustice

State v. Brown, Minn.Ct.App., 5/8/2017.  The state charged Mr. Brown with being an ineligible person in possession of a firearm. His ineligibility stemmed from a Florida conviction for an aggravated robbery and a couple other offenses.  Mr. Brown did some time in Florida and then went on probation, which Minnesota was supervising.  By all accounts, his Florida supervision was set to expire some four months after he agreed to plead guilty to the gun charge.

Mr. Brown's probation officers in both Florida and Minnesota confirmed this probation expiration date to his attorney, who in turn informed Mr. Brown.  Mr. Brown pled guilty to the gun charge, got probation and then got shipped off to Florida.  His Florida lawyer then told Mr. Brown that he was at risk of a life sentence as a result of his plea to the gun charge.

Mr. Brown moved to withdraw his plea.  He said that his plea had not been intelligently entered owing to not being informed about the potential life sentence.  (In fact, it's no potential; he's serving a life sentence.)  The post conviction court agreed, concluding that the life sentence was a "direct consequence" of the guilty plea to the gun case. Because Mr. Brown had not been informed of the possibility of this life sentence his plea was not intelligently made.

The court of appeals takes the post conviction court to task for its conclusion that the life sentence was a "direct consequence."  Such direct consequences are "definite, immediate[,] and automatic" and are "punitive and a part of a defendant's sentence.  Kaiser v. State, 641 N.W.2d 900, 907 (Minn. 2002).  

Well, okay.  But isn't it a "manifest injustice" to permit a plea to stand that is based upon counsel's affirmative misinformation about a "collateral consequence"?  Apparently not:

The caselaw does not compel us to conclude that misinformation about a collateral consequence renders a plea unintelligent and manifestly unjust. And such a categorical rule would require plea withdrawals for misadvice even about collateral consequences of little significance with possibly no effect on the defendant’s decision to plead guilty.