Opinion
Court of Appeals No. A-11282 Trial Court No. 2NO-11-213 CI No. 6023
02-26-2014
MATTHEW MOORE, Appellant, v. STATE OF ALASKA, Appellee.
Appearances: Randall S. Cavanaugh, Kalamarides & Lambert, Anchorage, for the Appellant. Michael Sean McLaughlin, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Special Prosecutions and Appeals, Anchorage, and Michael C. Geraghty, Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee.
NOTICE
Memorandum decisions of this court do not create legal precedent. See Alaska Appellate Rule 214(d) and Paragraph 7 of the Guidelines for Publication of Court of Appeals Decisions (Court of Appeals Order No. 3). Accordingly, this memorandum decision may not be cited as binding authority for any proposition of law.
MEMORANDUM OPINION
Appeal from the Superior Court, Second Judicial District, Nome, Ben Esch, Judge.
Appearances: Randall S. Cavanaugh, Kalamarides & Lambert, Anchorage, for the Appellant. Michael Sean McLaughlin, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Special Prosecutions and Appeals, Anchorage, and Michael C. Geraghty, Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee.
Before: Mannheimer, Chief Judge, Allard, Judge, and Hanley, District Court Judge .
Sitting by assignment made pursuant to Article IV, Section 16 of the Alaska Constitution and Administrative Rule 24(d).
Judge MANNHEIMER.
Matthew Moore appeals the superior court's dismissal of his petition for post-conviction relief.
Moore's petition was untimely. AS 12.72.020(a)(3)(A) declares that a petition for post-conviction relief must be filed within one year after the defendant's conviction was affirmed on appeal. Moore's petition was filed in July 2011 — approximately three and a half years after this Court finally affirmed both Moore's conviction and his sentence. See Moore v. State (I), 123 P.3d 1081 (Alaska App. 2005), and Moore v. State (II), 174 P.3d 770 (Alaska App., January 18, 2008).
In addition, AS 12.72.020(a)(6) declares that (with certain limited exceptions) a defendant is entitled to pursue only one action for post-conviction relief. Moore's 2011 petition for post-conviction relief was his second petition.
In 2003, while Moore's appeal was pending, he filed his first petition for post-conviction relief. In this first petition, as ultimately amended in 2008, Moore raised several claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. Two of Moore's claims were based on his trial attorney's allegedly incompetent failure to discover that one of the chief witnesses against him had prior convictions for crimes of dishonesty, and had lied about previously being employed as a police officer.
While this first petition was being litigated, Moore and his brother were charged with committing a new crime: Moore's brother allegedly smuggled drugs into the prison where Moore was being held for parole violations.
This new criminal charge was resolved by a plea bargain. The State reduced the charge against Moore from a felony to a misdemeanor, and the State agreed not to prosecute Moore's brother. In exchange, Moore pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge, and he agreed that the superior court would dismiss his petition for post-conviction relief with prejudice.
This agreed-upon resolution of Moore's first petition for post-conviction relief leads us to yet another reason why Moore was not entitled to pursue a second petition for post-conviction relief: the doctrine of res judicata.
Because Moore agreed to a dismissal of his first petition with prejudice, the claims he raised in that first petition — and the claims he could have raised in that petition — became res judicata. In other words, Moore was not entitled to raise those claims and potential claims in later litigation.
See Wooten v. Hinton, 202 P.3d 1148, 1153 (Alaska 2009) (unless the trial court expressly makes some other provision, when a plaintiff agrees to a dismissal of their lawsuit with prejudice, the dismissal is a final judgement that triggers the rules of res judicata). See also Charles A. Wright & Arthur R. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure (3rd ed. 2008), § 2364 (stating that a voluntary dismissal with prejudice "is a complete adjudication of the claims[,] and a bar to a further action on them between the parties").
The claims raised in Moore's second petition were based on the same underlying facts as the claims raised in his first petition; Moore simply reformulated his legal theory as to why those facts entitled him to relief. In his first petition, Moore argued that his trial attorney was incompetent for failing to discover the information we described above — information that would have impeached the credibility of a chief prosecution witness. In Moore's second petition, he relied on these same facts, but he now argued that the State committed a Brady violation by not telling his trial attorney about these facts.
See Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963).
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Because Moore was aware of these facts when he litigated his first petition for post-conviction relief, Moore could have raised this Brady claim in his first petition. The claim was therefore res judicata.
Because (1) Moore's second petition for post-conviction relief was untimely, because (2) it was a successive petition, and because (3) the claim raised in this second petition was res judicata, we uphold the superior court's dismissal of the petition.
The judgement of the superior court is AFFIRMED.