Willie Edd Reynolds v. State of Minnesota , 2016 Minn. App. LEXIS 5 ( 2016 )

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A14-0906
Willie Edd Reynolds, petitioner,
Appellant,
vs.
State of Minnesota,
Respondent.
Filed January 25, 2016
Reversed and remanded
Ross, Judge
Hennepin County District Court
File No. 27-CR-08-38331
Cathryn Middlebrook, Chief Appellate Public Defender, Kathryn J. Lockwood, Assistant
Public Defender, St. Paul, Minnesota (for appellant)
Lori Swanson, Attorney General, St. Paul, Minnesota; and
Michael O. Freeman, Hennepin County Attorney, Linda M. Freyer, Assistant County
Attorney, Minneapolis, Minnesota (for respondent)
Considered and decided by Ross, Presiding Judge; Hooten, Judge; and Smith, Judge.
SYLLABUS
A motion to correct a sentence under rule 27.03, subdivision 9, is a proper
mechanism for a convicted person to challenge the district court’s decision to amend his
sentence sua sponte by adding a statutorily required conditional-release term.
OPINION
ROSS, Judge
Willie Reynolds pleaded guilty to failure to register as a predatory offender. The
district court amended Reynolds’s sentence sua sponte three months after sentencing him,
adding a ten-year conditional-release term based on the court’s implicit finding that
Reynolds was a risk-level-III offender. Four years later Reynolds moved to vacate that term
of his sentence under Minnesota Rule of Criminal Procedure 27.03, subdivision 9. The
district court converted the rule 27.03 motion to a petition for postconviction relief and
denied it as time-barred under the postconviction statute. Because we conclude that
Reynolds could bring his sentencing challenge under rule 27.03 and that the judicial fact-
finding that supported the conditional-release term violated Reynolds’s Sixth Amendment
right to a jury fact-finding, we reverse and remand.
FACTS
In August 2008 Willie Reynolds was charged with failure to register as a predatory
offender in violation of Minnesota Statutes section 243.166, subdivision 5(a) (2006).
Reynolds pleaded guilty. The district court applied a downward durational departure based
on Reynolds’s willingness to take responsibility for his actions and sentenced him to a year
and one day in prison. But the district court did not impose any conditional-release term to
follow the incarceration. Three months after the sentencing, the district court—acting sua
sponte and without conducting a resentencing hearing—amended Reynolds’s sentence by
adding a ten-year conditional-release term under Minnesota Statutes section 243.166,
subdivision 5a (2006), apparently on the finding that Reynolds was a risk-level-III offender
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under Minnesota Statutes section 244.052 (2006) at the time Reynolds committed his
crime.
Four years later, in October 2013, Reynolds moved the district court to correct his
sentence under criminal procedural rule 27.03, subdivision 9. He asked the district court to
vacate the conditional-release term because it was not supported by a jury’s finding that he
was a level-III offender and he had not waived his Blakely right to a jury determination of
this fact that led to the additional sentence term. The district court did not consider the
request as a motion under rule 27.03, however, deeming it better suited as a petition for
postconviction relief. The district court then held that Reynolds’s challenge is time-barred
under Minnesota Statutes section 590.01, subdivision 4(a) (2012). The district court
nonetheless considered the merits of Reynolds’s request, and it held that its imposition of
the conditional-release term without a jury finding of Reynolds’s offender level did not
implicate Reynolds’s Sixth Amendment rights under the rule announced in Blakely. It
reasoned that an offender’s risk-level status is akin to an offender’s prior conviction, and
caselaw establishes that a district court can determine on its own whether an offender has
incurred a sentence-enhancing prior conviction.
Reynolds appeals.
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ISSUES
I. Was Reynolds’s motion to correct his sentence under criminal procedural rule
27.03, subdivision 9, a proper mechanism for his Blakely challenge to the district
court’s decision to amend his sentence and add a ten-year conditional-release term
to his incarceration period?
II. Did the district court violate Reynolds’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury under
Blakely v. Washington by adding a conditional-release term to Reynolds’s prison
sentence after relying on the court’s own finding that Reynolds was a risk-level-III
offender?
III. If the district court violated Reynolds’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury, what is
the proper remedy?
ANALYSIS
I
Reynolds argues that the district court erroneously denied his sentencing challenge
as time-barred. The district court treated Reynolds’s ostensible rule 27.03 motion as though
it were a petition for postconviction relief under Minnesota Statutes section 590.01 (2012).
It then held that the challenge is time-barred because Reynolds filed it more than four years
after his sentence and conviction became final—long after the deadline allowing the
statutory challenge. Reynolds’s argument requires us to interpret the rule, a task we
undertake de novo. State v. Martinez-Mendoza, 804 N.W.2d 1, 6 (Minn. 2011).
The district court correctly observed that the manner in which Reynolds’s challenge
is framed (as a challenge under the statute or a challenge under the rule) is significant. This
is because a district court may not consider a statutory postconviction petition if it was
“filed more than two years after . . . the entry of judgment of conviction or sentence if no
direct appeal is filed.” Minn. Stat. § 590.01, subd. 4(a). In contrast, the criminal rule
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provides that a district court “may at any time correct a sentence not authorized by law.”
Minn. R. Crim. P. 27.03, subd. 9 (emphasis added). Because Reynolds filed his challenge
more than two years after the statute’s general deadline, his challenge might never be
decided on the merits if it rests on the statute rather than on the rule. We must therefore
answer whether Reynolds’s challenge can rest only on the statute rather than on the rule.
The supreme court’s decision in State v. Her, 862 N.W.2d 692 (Minn. 2015), might
at first seem to answer the issue. The Her court considered the same substantive question
that Reynolds raises—whether the determination of a defendant’s status as a risk-level-III
offender is, under the Sixth Amendment, required to be found by a jury before the district
court can impose the ten-year, statutorily mandated conditional-release period. Id. at 694.
And the court considered the question based on the defendant’s motion to challenge his
sentence specifically under rule 27.03. Id. But even as it considered the challenge under
the rule, the Her court implicitly warned not to assume that it was necessarily approving
of rule 27.03 as the proper vehicle for the challenge. It expressly noted, “The State does
not challenge Her’s decision to bring his challenge through a Rule 27.03 motion.” Id. at
694 n.2. Whether the challenge can be brought under rule 27.03 therefore remains open.
The answer depends on the nature of Reynolds’s challenge. We have held that the
two-year statutory time limit does not apply to or restrict motions “properly filed” under
rule 27.03. Vazquez v. State, 822 N.W.2d 313, 318 (Minn. App. 2012). And a motion is
properly filed under the rule if the offender challenges a sentence on the grounds that “the
sentence is contrary to an applicable statute or other applicable law.” Washington v. State,
845 N.W.2d 205, 213 (Minn. App. 2014); see also Vazquez, 822 N.W.2d at 318 (holding
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that a challenge to a sentence based on the district court’s incorrect calculation of the
offender’s criminal-history score was properly raised under rule 27.03); State v. Amundson,
828 N.W.2d 747, 751 (Minn. App. 2013) (holding the same for a challenge based on an
unauthorized upward departure at sentencing). The supreme court has held that a challenge
is not properly filed under rule 27.03 when it implicates more than simply the sentence and
instead effectively challenges the validity of the underlying conviction or plea agreement.
State v. Coles, 862 N.W.2d 477, 480–81 (Minn. 2015); see also Wayne v. State, 870
N.W.2d 389, 391–92 (Minn. 2015) (applying Coles and deeming the claim outside the rule
because a victory would have entitled the claimant to “a new trial, not a reduced sentence”).
It is clear to us that Reynolds’s Blakely challenge does nothing to implicate his plea
or his conviction. He seeks only to remove a term of his sentence and he does so only on
the theory that he was unconstitutionally sentenced. Even if he prevails, his plea and
conviction are unaffected. Under this assessment, it appears that Reynolds properly brought
his challenge under the rule.
The state urges us to focus closely on the language of the rule, and in particular the
rule’s permission for the court to correct a sentence that is “not authorized by law.” The
state argues that this language (“by law”) contemplates challenges only to sentences “for
which there was no legal authority.” The state maintains that Reynolds’s challenge does
not essentially claim that the district court imposed a sentence that is “not authorized,” but
that the court imposed a statutorily authorized sentence that resulted merely from an
allegedly unauthorized sentencing procedure. The state buttresses its textual argument with
language in Blakely and in this state’s supreme court decision of State v. Chauvin, 723
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N.W.2d 20 (Minn. 2006). The state quotes the Blakely holding that “the State’s sentencing
procedure did not comply with the Sixth Amendment.” Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S.
296, 305, 124 S. Ct. 2531, 2538 (2004) (emphasis added). And it quotes the Chauvin
court’s description of Blakely, in its observation that “Blakely did not remove the ability of
a judge to impose an aggravated sentence, it only changed the process by which aggravated
sentences may be imposed,” and that Blakely “merely changed the steps that the court took
in arriving at a sentence already authorized by the legislature.” Chauvin, 723 N.W.2d at
25 (emphasis added). Because Reynolds’s ten-year conditional -release term is “a sentence
already authorized by the legislature,” (and, as the state points out, a ten-year release term
is actually mandated by the legislature for risk-level-III offenders, see Minn. Stat.
§ 243.166, subd. 5a (stating that if “at the time of the violation, the person was assigned to
risk level III . . . the court shall provide that . . . the commissioner shall place the person on
conditional release for ten years”)), the state maintains that Reynolds’s challenge is not
truly one that seeks to vacate a sentence “not authorized by law.”
We see two problems with the state’s plain-language argument. We address them
both.
The first problem with the state’s plain-language argument is that it does not
carefully consider the rule’s plain language. The rule does not expressly restrict itself to
challenges to sentences that are “not authorized by the legislature,” as the state implies; the
rule instead allows for challenges to sentences that are, more broadly, “not authorized by
law.” The federal and state constitutions articulate the court’s limited authority to impose
a criminal sentence, and those documents allow district courts to sentence a defendant only
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to the extent the legislature has generally authorized and only to the extent a jury has
specifically authorized. Reynolds is essentially arguing that the district court imposed a
sentence not authorized by law because the sentence includes a term that depends on a fact
not found by the jury. Because Reynolds’s challenge questions the legality of his sentence
and does not even remotely implicate either his conviction or the procedure leading to his
conviction, we conclude that his challenge fits both the plain language of rule 27.03 and
the caselaw that has construed the rule. He may therefore bring his challenge under the
rule.
The second problem with the state’s plain-language argument is that an attempt to
distinguish between a sentence that allegedly exceeds the legislative authority and one that
allegedly exceeds a district court’s constitutional authority is undermined by Blakely itself.
As the state supreme court recently pointed out, the Blakely Court “has defined [‘statutory
maximum’] for Sixth Amendment purposes as the maximum sentence a judge may impose
solely on the basis of the facts reflected in the jury verdict or admitted by the defendant.”
Her, 862 N.W.2d at 696 (quotation omitted); see also State v. Shattuck, 704 N.W.2d 131,
141–42 (Minn. 2005) (holding that the presumptive sentencing range in the Minnesota
Sentencing Guidelines determines the maximum sentence a district court may impose
without additional fact-finding). So even if the rule applies only to allegations that the
district court imposed a sentence exceeding the statutory maximum, Reynolds’s motion
fits the rule.
Although we rest on the language of rule 27.03, our reasoning finds support in the
treatment of a similar, albeit not identical, federal procedural rule. We have considered that
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“[t]he pertinent portion of Minnesota’s rule is modeled after a federal rule of criminal
procedure, as it existed before the federal sentencing guidelines.” Washington, 845 N.W.2d
at 213. For convictions before 1987, rule 35 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure
provided in part, “The court may correct an illegal sentence at any time . . . .” Fed. R. Crim.
P. 35 (1982). The Supreme Court stated that sentences subject to correction under the rule
are “those that the judgment of conviction did not authorize.” United States v. Morgan, 346
U.S. 502, 506, 74 S. Ct. 247, 250 (1954). The narrow function of rule 35 was to permit
correction of an illegal sentence, “not to re-examine errors occurring at the trial or other
proceedings prior to the imposition of sentence.” Hill v. United States, 368 U.S. 424, 430,
82 S. Ct. 468, 472 (1962).
Rather than restrict the federal rule to allow only challenges to sentences that
exceeded the statutory limits of the underlying crime, the Supreme Court more broadly
explained that a sentence could not be “illegal” under the rule if “[t]he punishment meted
out was not in excess of that prescribed by the relevant statutes, multiple terms were not
imposed for the same offense, nor were the terms of the sentence itself legally or
constitutionally invalid in any other respect.” Id. (emphasis added). It is true that federal
courts interpreting the Hill Court’s language did not allow for just any constitutional
sentence-related challenge under the rule. See, e.g., United States v. Peltier, 312 F.3d 938,
942 (8th Cir. 2002) (holding that petitioner’s challenge that “his sentences were imposed
in violation of his due process rights because they were based on information that was false
due to government misconduct” was not a challenge to an “illegal sentence” under rule 35).
But the federal circuit courts did interpret Hill to mean that a rule 35 challenge to a sentence
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could rest on a claim of a double jeopardy violation. See, e.g., United States v. Pavlico, 961
F.2d 440, 443 (4th Cir. 1992). In 1987, long before Blakely, Congress amended rule 35 to
remove the provision allowing district courts to correct an illegal sentence, and we are
aware of no federal caselaw considering whether the rule was ever applied to challenges to
sentences that arose from the district court’s allegedly exceeding its constitutional
sentencing authority in any way analogous to a Blakely challenge. But we are satisfied that
the federal courts understood the old federal rule in the same way we are applying rule
27.03 today. That is, a challenge to a sentence as an illegal sentence or a sentence not
authorized by law includes more than claims that the sentence exceeds the length allowed
by statute.
Having determined that Reynolds’s sentencing challenge fits the challenges
contemplated by rule 27.03, we turn to the district court’s alternative holding based on the
merits of the challenge.
II
As we have said, the supreme court has had the opportunity to decide the ultimate
legal question that Reynolds raises in his rule 27.03 motion. In State v. Her, the court held
that, in keeping with a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, a district court
can impose a ten-year conditional-release term based on a defendant’s status as a risk-level-
III offender only if the status has been either admitted by the defendant or found by a jury.
862 N.W.2d at 696. The district court here reached a different conclusion based on an
unpublished 2013 court of appeals opinion that, like the district court’s decision, preceded
the supreme court’s holding in Her. Applying Her, we hold that the district court’s
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imposition of the conditional-release term with neither an admission nor a jury finding of
Reynolds’s offender status level violated Reynolds’s Blakely rights. We therefore reverse
that part of Reynolds’s sentence.
III
The only remaining issue is the remedy. The Her court noted that it was expressing
no opinion on the proper remedy, observing that “neither party has addressed, nor did we
grant review on, the appropriate remedy for the constitutional violation.” Id. at 700 n.4. It
therefore remanded only with the general direction that the district court engage in “further
proceedings consistent with [the] opinion.” Id. at 700.
We are in a somewhat similar situation on the question of remedy, and we likewise
will return the case to the district court without specifying the particular remedy. Reynolds
argues that we should prohibit the district court from impaneling a sentencing jury to
determine his risk level because allowing the sentencing jury to determine the fact at this
juncture would constitute a double jeopardy violation. But Reynolds does not develop the
argument clearly enough for us to issue an opinion resolving it. And we observe that in our
prior decisions involving Blakely violations, we have placed no similar limitation on the
district court. See, e.g., State v. Ayala-Leyva, 848 N.W.2d 546, 559 (Minn. App. 2014),
review denied (Minn. Aug. 11, 2015); State v. Wiskow, 774 N.W.2d 612, 620 (Minn. App.
2009). More specifically, the supreme court decision in State v. Hankerson authorized the
retrospective use of a sentencing jury after finding a Blakely violation, and in doing so it
carefully considered but rejected Hankerson’s argument that a resentencing hearing would
constitute a violation of Hankerson’s right not to be subjected to double jeopardy. 723
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N.W.2d 232, 240 (Minn. 2006). Reynolds attempts to distinguish Hankerson and asserts
that the Hankerson court’s discussion leaves the door open for a double jeopardy restriction
in this circumstance. The state thoroughly discusses the issue, but it focuses substantially
on the district court’s inherent authority to impanel a sentencing jury; that original authority
does not answer what should be the appropriate remedial authority of the district court
following a violation. Under these circumstances, we believe the best approach is to allow
the parties the opportunity to develop the issue of the appropriate remedy more completely
and precisely in the district court, without prejudice to the theories presented but not fully
analyzed on appeal. We therefore leave it to the district court to first determine the
appropriate remedy on remand after the parties have had the opportunity to develop their
positions.
DECISION
Rule 27.03 is a mechanism through which Reynolds properly raised his Blakely
challenge, and the district court erred by treating his challenge as time-barred under the
postconviction statute and also by rejecting it on the merits. Because Reynolds’s risk level
at the time of the violation was neither found by a jury nor admitted by Reynolds before
sentencing, we reverse and remand for resentencing consistent with this opinion.
Reversed and remanded.
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