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Goins v. State8/4/2004
re honored in that prior proceeding. He argues that the State failed to meet that burden, and thus the district court erred in relying on this conviction to determine Goins's status as third offender (thus triggering the 60-day minimum term).
Generally, a defendant must pursue a petition for post-conviction relief to collaterally attack a prior conviction. However, we have recognized that a defendant may collaterally challenge a prior conviction at sentencing in limited circumstances. In Pananen v. State, we allowed a defendant to challenge a prior driving while intoxicated conviction from Wisconsin when, under Wisconsin law, the defendant had not been entitled to court-appointed counsel in the proceeding leading to his conviction. And in State v. Peel, we allowed a defendant to challenge a prior driving while intoxicated conviction from Louisiana when, under Louisiana law, the defendant had not been entitled to a jury trial in the proceeding leading to his conviction. More recently, in Brockway v. State, we noted the general rule that a defendant may attack a prior conviction "if the defendant was completely denied the right to counsel in the prior proceeding."
Goins's case is different from the situations we confronted in Pananen and Peel, where the law of the other jurisdiction refused to recognize a defendant's right to counsel or to a jury trial. Goins has not alleged that, under California law in 1971, a defendant charged with driving while intoxicated had no right to counsel or to a jury trial. Rather, Goins argues that because the State failed to present affirmative evidence that he was accorded those rights, Alaska courts must presume that he was denied those rights.
We reject Goins's argument that the 1971 conviction must be presumed to be constitutionally flawed. When a defendant collaterally challenges a prior conviction - that is, when he declines to appeal his conviction, but later, in a collateral proceeding, he seeks to deprive that conviction of its normal force and effect - the defendant must rebut the presumption of regularity that attaches to that prior judgment. As we observed in Jerrel v. State : "When the jurisdiction of a competent court has attached, every act is presumed to have been rightly done until the contrary appears." The rationale for this presumption is evident in cases such as the present one, where the validity of a conviction is challenged for the first time thirty years after it was entered. The government has a legitimate interest in the finality of judgments, and because collateral attacks threaten that finality, it is appropriate to impose the burden on the party making the challenge.
Goins argues that the normal presumption of regularity should not apply in his case because California lost or destroyed most of the records of the 1971 criminal proceeding. In support of this argument, Goins relies on Putnam v. State and Thorne v. State, which hold that the guarantee of due process of law requires the State to "preserve and make available to a criminal defendant material evidence gathered in a criminal investigation which may prove important in the preparation of the accused's defense."
But Putnam and Thorne have no bearing on Goins's case. Those cases concerned evidence relating to a defendant's guilt or innocence that the government had lost or destroyed before the defendant's trial. Furthermore, in Putnam and Thorne the State had sole possession of the evidence before it was lost or destroyed. Here, the State of Alaska had no possession of, and no control over, the records of the California court.
Goins, on the other hand, was present at the 1971 proceedings (or at least he had the opportunity to be
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