Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Tenth Rejects Petitioner's Claim He Was Improperly Treated as an Adult

Triplet v. Franklin, 2010 WL 409333 (2/5/10) (unpub'd) - In violation of Oklahoma law, the petitioner was treated as an adult, instead of a youthful offender, but he is not entitled to relief on the ground that appellate counsel failed to raise the issue. By pleading guilty, the petitioner waived his challenge to his treatment as an adult because the 10th infers by a byzantine and circular path that Oklahoma would not regard the error as jurisdictional and thus unwaivable [or at least there was enough question as to its jurisdictional nature to excuse counsel from raising the issue]. On the good news side, the petitioner was considered to be "in custody" for ยง 2254 purposes, even though he had finished serving the sentence he challenged, because the sentence was part of a series of consecutive sentences that must be considered in the aggregate for "custody" purposes.