Ali Abdul Hakim a/k/a Jesse James Williams v. State of Indiana (4/19/04 IndSCt) [Criminal Law & Procedure]
In a published order granting transfer and affirming the judgment of the trial court, the Court here addresses an issue relating to its March 10th decision in Robinson v. State (the Indiana Law Blog entry is here). Per the order:
Subsequent to the dismissal of this appeal, we issued our opinion in Robinson v. State, ___ N.E.2d ___ (Ind., March 10, 2004).Posted by Marcia Oddi at April 20, 2004 02:04 PMIn Robinson, we held that a motion to correct erroneous sentence based on clear facial error is not in the nature of a post-conviction proceeding, and therefore may also be filed after a post-conviction proceeding has already been conducted without seeking the prior authorization necessary for successive petitions for post-conviction relief under Indiana Post-Conviction Rule 1 § 12. We overruled any cases that held to the contrary. Thus, the basis for dismissal relied on by the Court of Appeals is no longer good law.
The Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal under its reading of the case law as it stood at that time. But regardless of whether this particular rule of law is to be applied to appeals pending at the time Robinson was decided, the appellant is not entitled to relief. For as we also stated in Robinson:
Sentencing judgments that report only days spent in pre-sentence confinement and fail to expressly designate credit time earned shall be understood by courts and by the Department of Correction automatically to award the number of credit time days equal to the number of pre-sentence confinement days. . . Because the omission of designation of the statutory credit time entitlement is thus corrected by this presumption, such omission may not be raised as an erroneous sentence.Appellant has no basis for filing a motion to correct erroneous sentence under our holding in Robinson and the trial court correctly denied the motion. We grant transfer of jurisdiction pursuant to Ind. Appellant Rule 58(A), vacating the dismissal order of the Court of Appeals, and affirm the judgment of the trial court.