Court Allows Defendant Another Chance to Challenge One-Day Sentence

In a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Abrahamson, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that a man convicted of misdemeanor theft and sentenced to one day in jail should get another chance to argue his counsel was ineffective.

When Jeffery Sutton was charged with misdemeanor theft, he decided to waive his right to a jury trial and have his case tried by the judge.  However, when the judge was interviewing him to determine whether his waiver of his jury trial right was "knowing, voluntarily, and intelligent," the judge forgot to make sure he understood he was waiving his right to a unanimous verdict.

After Sutton was convicted and sentenced to one day — time served — his attorney realized the judge’s mistake.  What happened next can’t be explained without taking up three paragraphs, but suffice it to say that his post-conviction counsel appears to have messed up somehow and wound up filing motion after motion in both the circuit court and court of appeals trying to get the mess straightened out.

Eventually, the court of appeals determined that he had messed it up too much, and Sutton had no more opportunities to try to correct that mistake.

The Supreme Court determined that the best thing to do with this Gordian knot was take a sword to it.  Even the State agreed that the defendant should have a chance to raise his claim that his waiver of his jury trial right wasn’t handled properly, but the parties disagreed on how, exactly, to do that.  The court used its power to undo the lower courts’ tangled web and let Sutton file a new motion for relief in the circuit court.