State v. Austin

                                       56

  Submitted October 4, affirmed December 1, 2021, petition for review denied
                         April 21, 2022 (

)


                       STATE OF OREGON,
                        Plaintiff-Respondent,
                                  v.
                     THOMAS LLOYD AUSTIN,
                        Defendant-Appellant.
                    Jackson County Circuit Court
                      18CR50415, 18CR56222;
                     A173041 (Control), A173042
                                  

    Defendant was convicted of arson and reckless burning. On appeal, he
makes an unpreserved argument that the trial court erred by accepting his jury
waiver and proceeding to a bench trial. That waiver occurred five months before
the United States Supreme Court held in Ramos v. Louisiana, 

, 

, 

 (2020), that, under the Sixth Amendment, a crimi-
nal defendant may be convicted of a serious offense only by unanimous verdict.
Defendant contends that his waiver of his constitutional right to a jury trial was
not “knowing” because, given Oregon law before Ramos, he could not have known
that the right he was relinquishing was the right to a jury trial with a unanimity
requirement. Held: Under existing United States Supreme Court case law, it is
not obvious or beyond dispute that the Sixth Amendment right to be convicted of
a serious offense only by unanimous jury verdict is the type of information that a
defendant must know for a jury waiver to be knowing and intelligent. Any error
in accepting defendant’s jury waiver was not “plain,” defeating the unpreserved
claim of error.
    Affirmed.


   Lorenzo A. Mejia, Judge.
   Ernest G. Lannet, Chief Defender, Criminal Appellate
Section, and Andrew D. Robinson, Deputy Public Defender,
Office of Public Defense Services, filed the briefs for
appellant.
   Ellen F. Rosenblum, Attorney General, Benjamin Gutman,
Solicitor General, and Christopher A. Perdue, Assistant
Attorney General, filed the brief for respondent.
   Before Armstrong, Presiding Judge, and Tookey, Judge,
and Aoyagi, Judge.
   AOYAGI, J.
   Affirmed.
Cite as 

 (2021)                               57

        AOYAGI, J.
         In consolidated cases, defendant was convicted of
one count of first-degree arson, ORS 164.325, and seven
counts of reckless burning, ORS 164.335. He raises four
assignments of error on appeal. In his first and second
assignments, defendant claims that he was legally entitled
to acquittal on all charges, for reasons related to the evi-
dence of his mental state. In his third and fourth assign-
ments, defendant claims that the trial court plainly erred
by accepting his jury waiver and proceeding to a bench
trial, “when the waiver could not have been made know-
ingly because Ramos had not been decided yet.” In Ramos
v. Louisiana, 

, 

, 

 (2020)—decided five months after defendant’s
trial—the United States Supreme Court held that, under
the Sixth Amendment, a criminal defendant may be con-
victed of a serious offense only by unanimous verdict.
         We reject defendant’s first and second assignments
of error without discussion and write only to address his
third and fourth assignments.
         In State v. Gomez, 

, 

 (2021), the defendant argued that the trial court plainly
erred by accepting his jury waiver, which he contended was
“invalid and involuntary” because it occurred before Ramos
was decided, at a time when proceeding to a jury trial risked
being convicted by a nonunanimous verdict, under the then-
existing authority of Apodaca v. Oregon, 

, 

, 

 (1972). We rejected that argument on
the basis that the record was “silent as to what role, if any,
the presence or absence of a unanimity requirement may
have played in defendant’s decision to waive jury.” 

 As a
result, the record was “insufficient to allow for meaningful
review of defendant’s claim that his waiver was essentially
compelled” by Oregon’s pre-Ramos practice of allowing con-
victions based on nonunanimous jury verdicts. 

        Defendant acknowledges our decision in Gomez but
argues that Gomez involved the voluntariness of a pre-Ramos
jury waiver, whereas the issue here is whether defendant’s
pre-Ramos jury waiver was “knowing.” Defendant argues
that his decision to waive jury and proceed with a bench
58                                             State v. Austin

trial was not “knowing” because, given the state of Oregon
law at the time that he waived, he could not have known
that, if he was tried to a jury, he was entitled to be convicted
only by unanimous guilty verdict. That is, he “could not
have been aware that the right he was relinquishing was
the right to a jury trial with a unanimity requirement.”

         As a general matter, the waiver of a constitutional
right must be voluntary, knowing, and intelligent. Colorado
v. Spring, 

, 

, 

 (1987) (discussing waiver of Fifth Amendment rights). It
must be “voluntary in the sense that it was the product of a
free and deliberate choice rather than intimidation, coercion,
or deception.” 

 (internal quotation marks omitted).
And it must be made with awareness “both of the nature of
the right being abandoned and the consequences of the deci-
sion to abandon it.” 

 (internal quotation marks omitted).
A waiver is knowing and intelligent if it is made “with suf-
ficient awareness of the relevant circumstances and likely
consequences.” Brady v. United States, 

, 

, 

 (1970) (discussing whether
a guilty plea was voluntary, knowing, and intelligent).

         Defendant compares this case to State v. Clark,

, 

 (2008), in which we consid-
ered a guilty plea entered before the United States Supreme
Court’s decision in Blakely v. Washington, 

, 

, 

 (2004), wherein the Court held
that a criminal defendant is generally entitled to have sen-
tence enhancement facts found by a jury. In Clark, the defen-
dant argued that he had not knowingly waived his right to a
jury trial on enhancement facts, where his plea agreement
provided that he was waiving the right to a “speedy and
public trial by jury at which the State would be required to
prove [his] guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” 

. We agreed, reasoning, “The plea agreement indicates
only that he knew that he had the right to a trial by jury at
which the state would be required to prove his guilt. Neither
the plea agreement nor anything else in the record supports
the inference that defendant was aware that the jury trial
right extended to sentencing facts.” 

 (emphasis in
original).
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         Ultimately, Clark turned on the scope of the defen-
dant’s jury waiver. Here, by contrast, defendant unambigu-
ously waived the right to a jury trial, which is the only right
at issue, including answering affirmatively when the trial
court asked: “And you do give up your right to have this mat-
ter tried by a jury as to any facts, and you wish the matter
to be totally tried by a judge; is that correct?” In this case,
the issue is not whether defendant knew that he was giving
up the right to a jury but, instead, whether defendant could
“knowingly” and intelligently give up that right if he did
not know that such right included the right to be convicted
only by unanimous verdict. Or, to use the Court’s words
from Brady, 

, the question is whether the fed-
eral constitutional right to be convicted only by unanimous
jury verdict is one of the “relevant circumstances” that a
defendant must know for his jury waiver to be knowing and
intelligent.
         Reiterating that the issue is before us in a plain-
error posture, we conclude that the trial court did not err in
accepting defendant’s jury waiver and proceeding to a bench
trial. Error is plain only when it is a legal error apparent on
the face of the record and “the legal point is obvious, not rea-
sonably in dispute.” State v. Brown, 

, 

 (1990). Under existing United States Supreme Court
case law, it is not obvious or beyond dispute that the federal
constitutional right to be convicted only by unanimous jury
verdict is the type of “relevant circumstance” that a defen-
dant must know for his waiver of the right to a jury trial to
be knowing and intelligent.1
          Two Supreme Court precedents involving guilty
pleas are instructive. Pleading guilty entails the waiver of
several constitutional rights, including the right to a jury
trial, see Boykin v. Alabama, 

, 

,
    1
      For present purposes, we accept defendant’s premise that he “could not have
known that he had a right to unanimous jury before the United States Supreme
Court announced the existence of that right in Ramos.” The state challenges that
premise—noting that, at the time of defendant’s jury waiver, the Supreme Court
had already granted certiorari and held oral argument in Ramos—and argues
that, akin to Gomez, we could reject defendant’s claim of error based on his fail-
ure to make a record as to what role, if any, the uncertainty surrounding Ramos
had in his decision to waive jury. Because we conclude that, in any event, any
error was not plain, we need not address that issue.
60                                                   State v. Austin

 (1969), making those cases relevant despite
their different context. In Brady, 

, the peti-
tioner alleged that his guilty plea was not voluntary, know-
ing, and intelligent, where he had pleaded guilty to avoid
the possibility of a death sentence (based on his lawyer’s
advice), and, several years later, the Court issued a decision
to the effect that he could not have been sentenced to death
after a jury trial in that circumstance. The Court rejected
the petitioner’s argument, reasoning that his plea was intel-
ligently made in light of the law as it existed at that time:
     “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. A defendant is not entitled to
     withdraw his plea merely because he discovers long after
     the plea has been accepted that his calculus misappre-
     hended the quality of the State’s case or the likely penalties
     attached to alternative courses of action. 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.”

 (citations omitted; emphasis added).
         In United States v. Ruiz, 

, 

, 

 (2002), the Court rejected the Ninth
Circuit’s view that a guilty plea was not voluntary unless, at
the time of plea, the prosecutors had disclosed all materials
that the defendant would be entitled to receive before trial
commenced. The Court recognized that “the more informa-
tion the defendant has, the more aware he is of the likely
consequences of a plea, waiver, or decision, and the wiser
that decision will likely be.” 

 But it rejected the idea that
a defendant must have “complete knowledge” to enter a
valid plea, and even allowed for “various forms of misappre-
hension under which a defendant might labor”:
     “[T]he Constitution, in respect to a defendant’s aware-
     ness of relevant circumstances, does not require complete
     knowledge of the relevant circumstances, but permits a
     court to accept a guilty plea, with its accompanying waiver
     of various constitutional rights, despite various forms of
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   misapprehension under which a defendant might labor. See
   Brady v. United States, 

 (defendant ‘misap-
   prehended the quality of the State’s case’); 

 (defendant
   misapprehended ‘the likely penalties’); 

 (defendant
   failed to ‘anticipate’ a change in the law regarding rele-
   vant ‘punishments’); McMann v. Richardson, 

 (1970) (counsel ‘misjudged the admissibility’ of a ‘con-
   fession’); United States v. Broce, 

 (1989)
   (counsel failed to point out a potential defense); Tollett
   v. Henderson, 

 (1973) (counsel failed to
   find a potential constitutional infirmity in grand jury
   proceedings).”
Id. at 630-31.
         For the reasons discussed, we cannot say that the
trial court plainly erred in accepting defendant’s jury waiver
and proceeding to a bench trial.
         Affirmed.