Ronald Dingle v. Robert Stevenson ( 2016 )

PUBLISHED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
No. 15-6832
RONALD DONALD DINGLE,
Petitioner - Appellant,
v.
WARDEN ROBERT M. STEVENSON,
Respondent - Appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of
South Carolina, at Florence. Bruce H. Hendricks, District
Judge. (4:13-cv-02487-BHH)
Argued: September 20, 2016 Decided: October 25, 2016
Before WILKINSON, MOTZ, and HARRIS, Circuit Judges.
Affirmed by published opinion. Judge Wilkinson wrote the
opinion, in which Judge Motz and Judge Harris joined.
ARGUED: Stephen J. van Stempvoort, MILLER JOHNSON, Grand Rapids,
Michigan, for Appellant. Alphonso Simon, Jr., OFFICE OF THE
ATTORNEY GENERAL OF SOUTH CAROLINA, Columbia, South Carolina,
for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Alan Wilson, Attorney General, John W.
McIntosh, Chief Deputy Attorney General, Donald J. Zelenka,
Assistant Deputy Attorney General, OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY
GENERAL OF SOUTH CAROLINA, Columbia, South Carolina, for
Appellee.
WILKINSON, Circuit Judge:
More than twenty years ago, Ronald Donald Dingle was
indicted for murder and a host of other crimes committed while
he was a minor. The state of South Carolina intended to seek the
death penalty against him, and Dingle pled guilty in exchange
for a life sentence with the opportunity for parole.
Dingle now seeks to challenge the validity of his guilty
plea and appeals the district court’s denial of relief on his 28
U.S.C. § 2254 petition. We granted a certificate of
appealability on the limited issue of whether Roper v. Simmons,
543 U.S. 551 (2005), which invalidated the death penalty for
juvenile offenders, may be applied retroactively to invalidate
Dingle’s guilty plea. We hold that Roper does not provide an
avenue for relief and affirm the district court’s dismissal of
his federal habeas petition.
I.
While the procedural posture of this case is something of a
tangle, the facts relevant to the issue on which we granted the
certificate are relatively straightforward.
On March 15, 1993, Dingle, a seventeen-year-old juvenile at
the time of the offense, was charged by the state of South
Carolina with murder, assault and battery with intent to kill,
first-degree burglary, kidnapping, pointing a firearm, two
counts of possession of a weapon during a violent crime, and two
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counts of possession of a sawed-off shotgun. The state filed a
notice of intent to seek the death penalty, and on April 17,
1995, Dingle pled guilty to all the charges in exchange for life
imprisonment with the possibility of parole. Although the trial
judge sentenced Dingle to consecutive terms of imprisonment
following the initial life sentence for murder, all parties
agreed that Dingle should be eligible for parole after thirty
years.
As it turned out, however, the consecutive nature of
Dingle’s sentences precluded any possibility of parole. Dingle
filed an application for post-conviction relief (“PCR”),
asserting that the prospect of parole eligibility was an
integral element of the plea bargain. On December 5, 1997, the
PCR court vacated the sentences and remanded “for sentencing
consistent with the intent of the plea agreement or for a new
trial.” J.A. 338.
After several years went by without a hearing, Dingle filed
a motion for speedy trial in the Sumter County Court of General
Sessions. In the meantime, the Supreme Court decided Roper v.
Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), which held that imposing capital
punishment on juvenile offenders was a violation of the Eighth
Amendment. At the hearing on July 28, 2005, Dingle argued that
he should be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea because, in
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light of Roper, he no longer received the benefit of a bargain
premised on avoiding the death penalty.
The Court of General Sessions rejected Dingle’s request for
a new trial. Rather, the court determined that the plea should
be evaluated based on the law as it existed in 1995 – the court
could give him the benefit of his bargain by restructuring the
sentence such that he would be eligible for parole after thirty
years. Dingle appealed and the South Carolina Supreme Court
rejected the claim that Roper deprived him of the benefit of his
plea deal. State v. Dingle, 659 S.E.2d 101, 106 (S.C. 2008).
On January 8, 2009, Dingle filed a second application for
PCR. This time, he argued that Roper applied retroactively to
his case and that his guilty plea was involuntary because it was
made for the sole purpose of avoiding cruel and unusual
punishment. The PCR court found that the essence of Dingle’s
Roper claim was already raised and ruled upon by the South
Carolina Supreme Court. Accordingly, it was barred by res
judicata. Dingle unsuccessfully appealed the PCR court’s order,
and filed a third application for PCR that was later dismissed.
Dingle also filed a petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 for a
writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for
the District of South Carolina. In his petition, Dingle raised
four claims of error. On November 10, 2009, the district court
dismissed the claims without prejudice.
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On September 13, 2013, Dingle filed the instant § 2254
petition. He contested his conviction on six grounds, including
various assertions of ineffective assistance of counsel and
prosecutorial misconduct. The magistrate judge recommended
denying the petition in its entirety, rejecting some of the
claims on the merits and finding that others were procedurally
defaulted. The district court adopted the magistrate judge’s
report and recommendation and denied relief on Dingle’s § 2254
petition. This court granted a certificate of appealability on a
single issue: “whether Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005),
may be applied retroactively to invalidate Dingle’s guilty plea
where, pre-Roper, he allegedly pled guilty to avoid the death
penalty.” We denied a certificate as to all other claims.
II.
Dingle’s primary contention is that his guilty plea should
be abrogated in light of Roper’s holding that the death penalty
may not be imposed on juvenile offenders. He asserts, first,
that Roper articulated a substantive rule that applies
retroactively to his case, see Montgomery v. Louisiana, 136 S.
Ct. 718, 734 (2016) (“Miller is no less substantive than are
Roper and Graham.”), and, second, that if the state cannot seek
the death penalty against him now, it was improper for the state
to do so in 1995. Accordingly, because the plea agreement was
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motivated by a desire to avoid cruel and unusual punishment,
Dingle argues that his plea was involuntary and invalid.
In resolving this question, we reiterate that this appeal
does not raise such issues as ineffective assistance of counsel
or prosecutorial misconduct in the plea negotiations. The court
was careful to limit the certificate of appealability to the
Roper claim and to deny a certificate to all remaining claims,
many of which are better suited for and have been addressed in
other proceedings. The case that comes before us is a pure
question of law: whether Roper, of its own force as a
substantive rule, applies retroactively to undo a guilty plea.
There are several difficulties with this argument, which we
address in turn. *
A.
The Supreme Court in Roper announced a distinct
constitutional rule prohibiting the imposition of the death
penalty on juvenile offenders. Roper, 543 U.S. at 568. In so
doing, however, the Court was careful to limit the scope of this
* The state argues that AEDPA’s deferential standard of
review governs this action. AEDPA, however, applies only to
claims that have been “adjudicated on the merits in State court
proceedings,” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) (2012), and there is some
dispute as to whether South Carolina courts actually decided
Dingle’s Roper claim on the merits. Because we would affirm the
district judge in all events, we will apply de novo review to
this case.
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constitutional bar to the “most severe punishment” of a capital
sentence, where the Eighth Amendment applies with “special
force.” Id. The Court therefore made clear that its holding
should be construed to apply only to the sentence actually at
issue in that case, which was capital punishment.
Dingle nonetheless argues that Roper is a substantive rule
and should apply retroactively to invalidate his guilty plea.
This contention, however, compares apples and oranges. We
readily grant that Roper announced a substantive rule, but that
does not decide the outcome of the case at hand. The inescapable
fact is that Dingle did not receive the death penalty. Nor did
he receive a life sentence without parole. See Miller v.
Alabama, 132 S. Ct. 2455 (2012). Rather, Dingle received a life
sentence with the possibility of parole after thirty years. In
essence, Dingle seeks to extrapolate from the distinct
constitutional right recognized in Roper to a much broader
substantive rule that extends to plea agreements negotiated in
the shadow of the death penalty.
The district court correctly found that Roper did not apply
to situations where a defendant pled guilty to a non-capital
sentence to avoid the possibility of a capital sentence. Dingle
v. Stevenson, 772 F. Supp. 2d 734, 740 (D.S.C. 2009). The death
penalty here operated only as part of the calculus in the plea
negotiations, and acknowledging that Roper might have altered
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the calculus is a far cry from finding that its substantive rule
applies. It happens in the ordinary give and take of a plea
bargain that a substantive rule may indirectly bear on the
outcome of the negotiation. Yet the Supreme Court has not
suggested that a substantive rule would stretch beyond the
proscribed sentence to reopen guilty pleas with a different
sentence. See Montgomery v. Louisiana, 136 S. Ct. 718 (2016).
Rather, when a defendant pleads guilty based on the strength of
the state’s case and an assessment of the range of penalties to
which he might otherwise be exposed, we have been especially
reluctant to rescind the bargain. See United States v. Fugit,
703 F.3d 248, 253 (4th Cir. 2012) (citing United States v.
Dominguez Benitez, 542 U.S. 74, 82-83 (2004)). Pleading guilty
typically entails a deliberate choice to accept the risks and
rewards of a deal, and that decision may not be casually set
aside on the basis of buyer’s remorse.
B.
This precise principle was put in play in Brady v. United
States, 397 U.S. 742 (1970). There, as here, a criminal
defendant was death eligible and entered into a plea agreement
to avoid capital punishment. Subsequent legal developments would
have made the defendant ineligible for the death penalty, and
the defendant urged on that basis that he be permitted to
withdraw his plea. Id. at 756 (citing United States v. Jackson,
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390 U.S. 570 (1968)). The Court rejected that contention, and
its language is worth quoting because it is highly pertinent
here:
Often the decision to plead guilty is heavily
influenced by the defendant’s appraisal of the
prosecution’s case against him and by the apparent
likelihood of securing leniency should a guilty plea
be offered and accepted. Considerations like these
frequently present imponderable questions for which
there are no certain answers; judgments may be made
that in the light of later events seem improvident,
although they were perfectly sensible at the time.
Id. at 756-57.
And again:
The rule that a plea must be intelligently made to be
valid does not require that a plea be vulnerable to
later attack if the defendant did not correctly assess
every relevant factor entering into his decision. . .
. More particularly, absent misrepresentation or other
impermissible conduct by state agents, a voluntary
plea of guilty intelligently made in the light of the
then applicable law does not become vulnerable because
later judicial decisions indicate that the plea rested
on a faulty premise.
Id. at 757 (citation omitted).
And again:
The fact that Brady did not anticipate United States
v. Jackson does not impugn the truth or reliability of
his plea. We find no requirement in the Constitution
that a defendant must be permitted to disown his
solemn admissions in open court that he committed the
act with which he is charged simply because it later
develops that the State would have had a weaker case
than the defendant had thought or that the maximum
penalty then assumed applicable has been held
inapplicable in subsequent judicial decisions.
Id. (citation omitted).
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Brady is remarkable not only for the fact that the Court
emphatically repeated its holding, but that it managed to drive
the point home in so many different ways. Dingle tries to assert
that the coercion involved in his plea negotiation was uniquely
debilitating because he “knuckl[ed] under threat” of what we now
understand to be cruel and unusual punishment. App. Br. at 24.
But the logic in Brady applies generally, regardless of the
reason that a defendant is no longer death eligible. See Brady,
397 U.S. at 755 (“[A] plea of guilty is not invalid merely
because entered to avoid the possibility of a death penalty.”).
Contracts in general are a bet on the future. Plea bargains
are no different: a classic guilty plea permits a defendant to
gain a present benefit in return for the risk that he may have
to forego future favorable legal developments. Dingle received
that present benefit – avoiding the death penalty and life
without parole - under the law as it existed at the time.
Although Roper, in hindsight, altered the calculus underlying
Dingle’s decision to accept a plea agreement, it does not
undermine the voluntariness of his plea. Some element of
pressure exists in every deal, as the tradeoff between present
certainty and future uncertainty is emblematic of the process of
plea bargaining. Brady makes all that exceptionally clear and in
following its teachings we find no infirmity in the plea that
Dingle entered.
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III.
The judgment of the district court is accordingly
AFFIRMED.
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