Before a defendant pleads guilty, the court must first make sure the defendant knows what he or she is doing and they have not been threatened or forced to plead guilty. The defendant must also be informed that pleading guilty means giving up certain rights, including the right to a trial and to appeal. The defendant must understand all the warnings and still desire to plead guilty before the court can accept the plea and impose a sentence.

You might think that when a person gives up the right to appeal, that means they give up the right to appeal, but that is not true. Many cases are still appealed after the defendant pleads guilty and is sentenced. This protection exists so that issues that arise during sentencing can be addressed.

Several things can be appealed; if the sentence is illegal in some way, if the offender score (a number based on prior convictions) was incorrectly calculated, if the defense lawyer was wrong about the way prison ‘good time’ is calculated, or maybe, (my personal favorite) the defendant now disagrees with the sentence. Apparently, the variety of things that can form the basis for an appeal is limited only by the well-fertilized imagination of the lawyer handling the appeal.

Not long ago we received the Court of Appeals decision on one of these appeals. The man had pleaded guilty as charged to 2 counts of Vehicular Assault (drunk driving with serious injuries to someone) with his private attorney standing by his side. He also pleaded to the aggravated circumstances of the case and agreed that he could be sentenced up to a maximum of 120 months. Under the terms of the plea, the defendant could ask for less than 120 months, and the prosecutor agreed not to argue for any amount of time, but let the victim tell how the crash had affected her life.

At sentencing, the Judge sentenced the defendant to 72 months. The defendant, with the same lawyer, then appealed, arguing that the prosecutor broke the deal by saying something he should not have said to the court and that the judgment incorrectly classified the crime as a “serious violent crime,” instead of just a “violent crime.”

The Court of Appeals decided that the prosecutor had not broken the agreement and upheld the 72-month sentence, but agreed that the judgment incorrectly classified the crime and should be corrected. In the end, the system worked. A legal sentence was imposed and a mistake corrected. A drunk driver who ruined someone’s life will remain in prison as sentenced.