Osburn v. State
Osburn v. State
Opinion of the Court
Appellant Kenneth Ray Osburn appeals the denial and dismissal of his petition for writ of error coram nobis. Because the trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying relief, we affirm.
Osburn was initially convicted in the Ashley County Circuit Court of capital murder and kidnapping for the disappearance and death of a seventeen-year-old girl, but on appeal, this court reversed and remanded for a new trial because of evidentiary errors. Osburn v. State ,
Following the remand, Osburn entered a negotiated guilty plea to kidnapping and second-degree murder for an aggregate sentence of 480 months' imprisonment.
The standard of review of an order entered by the trial court on a petition for writ of error coram nobis is whether the trial court abused its discretion in granting or denying the writ. Griffin v. State ,
A writ of error coram nobis is an extraordinarily rare remedy, and proceedings for the writ are attended by a strong presumption that the judgment of conviction is valid. Jackson v. State ,
The writ is allowed under compelling circumstances to achieve justice and to address errors of the most fundamental nature. Rayford v. State ,
On appeal, Osburn raises two points for reversal. In the first, he alleges error in the trial court's failure to issue the writ because he asserted that a violation of Brady v. Maryland ,
Suppression of material exculpatory evidence by a prosecutor falls within one of the four previously recognized categories of coram nobis relief. Thacker v. State ,
To the extent that Osburn contests testimony that was given at his first trial, the State correctly asserts that those issues were made moot by this court's reversal on direct appeal invalidating the first judgment. See Green v. State ,
To the extent that Osburn alleged that suppression by the prosecution of the "case file" in case No. 21CR-82-27 had caused him to enter an involuntary plea at his second trial, his argument also fails. The information that Osburn contends was suppressed was public information that was readily available. The dismissal of case No. 21CR-82-27 would be shown on the court's docket as a public record. Because the information was public, it was not subject to being withheld or suppressed. Wallace ,
In Osburn's second and last point on appeal, he asserts error in the trial court's conclusion that his allegations of ineffective assistance were not cognizable. Osburn asserts that he was entitled to effective assistance in the plea proceedings that were his trial. Regardless of Osburn's entitlement to counsel, ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims are not cognizable in error coram nobis proceedings. Gray v. State ,
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Affirmed.
Hart, J., concurs.
I concur with the disposition reached by the majority, but I take issue with its handling of Osburn's Brady claim, the substance of which is that the State failed to produce a case file concerning a previous prosecution against Osburn.
The majority suggests that any Brady claim related to the case file is now moot because after this court's remand (regardless of whether the case file should have been turned over before Osburn's "first" trial), Osburn entered a negotiated guilty plea of guilty, and accordingly there is no trial record that would allow this court to assess whether the case file's alleged concealment would have prejudiced Osburn. The logical extension of the majority's rationale is that one cannot establish prejudice for purposes of a Brady violation unless there has been a full trial on the merits in the same criminal proceeding. This would be incorrect, and I fear that the majority opinion thus improperly limits the writ of error coram nobis. If the evidence was in fact exculpatory or impeaching, the evidence was in fact concealed before Osburn's trial, that concealment did in fact continue through the trial, on appeal, and into the remand process, and the evidence's disclosure would in fact have created a reasonable probability of a different outcome (i.e., that Osburn would not have pled to or been convicted of the charges to which he pled), then I would see no reason why the writ of error coram nobis should not lie here.
Even so, Osburn's Brady claim is properly denied because the allegations contained in Osburn's petition would not establish that the case file was concealed from Osburn by the State. Instead, it appears that Osburn was well aware of the case file's existence long before his first trial. He alleges that his own counsel, mistakenly believing that the case file had no relation to charges at hand, failed to utilize it. This is not an allegation of concealment by the State, but of ineffective assistance by his own counsel, which is not a cognizable claim in error coram nobis proceedings. If Osburn intends to suggest that this failure by his trial counsel is somehow attributable to deception or misconduct by the prosecution, it is his burden to set out facts that would support that assertion.
I concur.
Osburn brought an interlocutory appeal of the denial of his motion to prohibit the State from seeking the death penalty on retrial, which this court affirmed. Osburn v. State ,
When the judgment or conviction was entered on a plea of guilty or nolo contendere, the petition for writ of error coram nobis is filed directly in the trial court. Noble v. State ,
Reference
- Full Case Name
- Kenneth Ray OSBURN v. STATE of Arkansas
- Cited By
- 17 cases
- Status
- Published