Peguero, Manuel D. v. U.S. (03/02/1999)

By: Lisa Fingeret, Medill News Service

Questions presented

Whether a court may grant collateral relief under 28 U.S.C. 2255 on the ground that the sentencing court failed to advise the defendant of his right to appeal, as required by Rule 32 of the Federal Rules of CriminalProcedure, where the defendant knew that he had the right to appeal and elected not to appeal.

Brief

In June 1997, Manuel D. Peguero was sitting in jail contemplating his future. Five years earlier, he had pleaded guilty to drug charges in a Pennsylvania court and been sentenced to more than 22 years in prison for distributing cocaine.

But a key step was overlooked in his sentencing hearing: informing Peguero of his right to appeal the sentence.

How much the omission has prejudiced Peguero's chance to appeal has been argued in several different hearings because he apparently knew that he had the right to appeal.

But his lawyer says it doesn't matter whether Peguero knew he had the right to appeal the sentence. Because the court failed to inform Peguero of this right, the government should automatically reinstate his appellate rights. The argument, says Daniel Siegel, Pegueros attorney, stresses efficiency.

""Under my approach, the district court would just review the transcript from the sentencing hearing,"" Siegel says. If the defendant were not informed of his right to appeal, the judge would then issue an order granting post-conviction relief, without having to prove that the court's failure hurt the defendant. ""It should be an automatic test,"" he says.

But so far, there has been nothing automatic about Peguero's quest for an appeal. His path has been full of pitfalls and curves.

In 1997, he filed a motion from jail claiming that his former attorney had failed to file an appeal on his behalf, even though he had asked him to do so. At that time, he also said the court had failed to tell him of his right to appeal. It came down to his attorney's word against his. The attorney said he told Mr. Peguero he could appeal, but that Peguero did not want to, that he wanted to cooperate with the government in the hopes that it would lessen his sentence.

The court took the attorney's word over Peguero's and he lost.

But he took one of his claims to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals: that he be allowed to appeal because the court failed to inform him of his rights.

Peguero lost there, too, in an unpublished opinion, but he did not give up.

""All this guy wants is for me to be able to file an appeal,"" Siegel says. Ironically, though the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, Peguero was still never able to appeal his sentence. The issue at hand was if he should be allowed to appeal it.

The U.S. Solicitor General said because it is ""undisputed"" that Peguero knew of his right to appeal, the courts failure to inform him of this right does not did not result in ""a complete miscarriage of justice."" In order to grant Peguero post-conviction relief, he would need to prove that his rights were compromised because of the courts oversight—something he has been unable to do.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari on Sept. 29, 1998, and allowed Peguero to proceed in forma pauperis.

Siegel and the Roy McLeese III of the U.S. Solicitor Generals office argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 11, 1999.

On March 2, 1999, the Court affirmed, holding that the district court's failure to advise the defendant of his right to appeal did not entitle him to habeas relief since he knew of his right and hence suffered no prejudice from the omission. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy conceded that even the trial court's failure to give the required advice was error, as a general rule, a court's failure to give a defendant advice is a sufficient basis for collateral relief only when the defendant is prejudiced by the error. Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer concurred.