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Commonwealth v. Brown4/29/2005
inition, establish no binding precedent for future cases. E.g., Commonwealth v. Bethea, 828 A.2d 1066, 1073 (Pa. 2003); Hoy v. Angelone, 720 A.2d 745, 750 (Pa. 1998); see also Interest of O.A., 717 A.2d 490, 496 n.4 (Pa. 1998) (Opinion Announcing Judgment of Court by Cappy, J.) ("While the ultimate order of a plurality opinion, i.e. an affirmance or reversal, is binding on the parties in that particular case, legal conclusions and/or reasoning employed by a plurality certainly do not constitute binding authority.").
Third, even if Justice Roberts' agreement that a remand was required in Nelson could be deemed a joinder in the "rule of law" Nelson "established," it requires noting that the rule thereby "established" by Nelson was that a waived claim of mental incompetency is reviewable only as a claim sounding in ineffective assistance of counsel. Thus, in the very next paragraphs following the Majority's abbreviated quotation from Nelson, the plurality actually disposed of the case as follows:
Instantly no competency hearing was held, nor was one requested. The issue as it had survived for us, then, is not whether appellant would have passed the two-pronged test for competency, it is rather only whether his counsel was ineffective for failing to raise the claim that he would not.
Accordingly, the case is remanded for an evidentiary hearing to determine whether trial counsel had "any reasonable basis" for foregoing a claim of "arguable merit." . Following such hearing should the court determine trial counsel was ineffective for not requesting a competency hearing, it should order such a hearing. . If no ineffectiveness is found, the judgment of sentence is affirmed.
414 A.2d at 1001 (footnote and citations omitted). Thus, if Nelson is truly precedential, it stands for the proposition that where, as here, a competency claim has been defaulted at trial without a hearing, a collateral claim implicating competency is reviewable only as a claim sounding in the ineffective assistance of counsel. Coincidentally, that is how appellant in this case poses his claim, and it is how the appellant in Santiago posed his claim. Both the Santiago plurality and today's Majority act contrary to Nelson in converting the claim.
The third 1980 case, Giknis, was filed five months after Nelson and was written by the author of the Nelson plurality opinion. Like Fernandez, Giknis was a unanimous decision in a case involving a defendant who had pleaded guilty to murder and belatedly sought to challenge his competency on PCHA review. The Giknis Court, like the Nelson Court, inexplicably failed to cite or even to acknowledge the unanimous opinion in Fernandez. In addition, the Giknis Court approached the competency/waiver question differently than either Fernandez or Nelson -- without purporting to distinguish, limit, or overrule those decisions. Thus, although Giknis quoted the PCHA waiver provision, including its "knowing and understanding" standard, Giknis did not follow Fernandez. Indeed, the Giknis Court did not inquire into the circumstances of the waiver at all. Nor did the author of Giknis follow his plurality opinion in Nelson and remand for an ineffectiveness hearing on the question of why trial counsel failed to challenge his client's competency to be tried.
Instead, the Giknis Court cited that portion of the Nelson plurality opinion which had cited Marshall and Tyson for the tangential proposition that competency claims are not waivable on direct appeal and concluded, without further explanation, that the two competency issues raised on collateral review in Giknis therefore must be reached on the merits. This rather remarkable, truncated analysis never acknowl
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