Baker, J.
After serving nearly eleven years in the Department of Correction as an habitual offender, Stanley Watson attained post-conviction relief and had his habitual offender status vacated. The State then filed a new petition alleging that Watson was an habitual offender based on other information. After continuances, delays, and recusals amounting to another six and two-thirds years, Watson was once again adjudicated to be an habitual offender. Now, Watson appeals his habitual offender status, arguing that his right to a speedy trial was violated pursuant to Indiana Criminal Rule 4(C). Finding that the State failed to bring Watson to court within the one-year deadline, we reverse and remand with instructions to vacate Watson’s habitual offender status.
In 2001, Watson was convicted of Class A felony dealing in cocaine and Class A conspiracy to deliver cocaine following a jury trial. In a separate hearing, the jury also adjudicated Watson to be an habitual offender based on convictions from 1990, 1992, and 1997. Then, on August 28, 2001, the trial court sentenced Watson to fifty years imprisonment, enhanced by thirty years due to the habitual offender adjudication, for an aggregate sentence of eighty years.
However, on April 2, 2012, the trial court granted Watson’s petition for post-conviction relief and vacated the habitual offender adjudication, finding that two of the three felonies cited by the State could not form the basis of an habitual offender adjudication. The State was granted leave to amend the information, and on November 28, 2012, the State refiled its habitual offender allegation based on three other convictions from 1972, 1977, and 1981.
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Following the November 27-28, 2018, rehearing, the jury adjudicated Watson to be an habitual offender. Accordingly, the trial court re-enhanced Watson’s sentence by thirty years on December 20, 2018. Watson now appeals.
We consolidate Watson’s multiple arguments into one dispositive issue: whether the State failed to bring Watson to court within the one-year deadline articulated in Indiana Criminal Rule 4(C). ….
The State contends that Criminal Rule 4(C) does not apply here. The State cites Poore v. State, in which our Supreme Court determined that Criminal Rule 4(B)’s mandate to bring a criminal defendant to trial within seventy days upon request applies to mistrials. 685 N.E.2d 36, 41 (Ind. 1997). Because our Supreme Court had the opportunity in Poore to address Criminal Rule 4(C)’s scope and chose not to, the State argues, Poore precluded any legal discussion about the rule’s applicability to habitual offender rehearings. Thus, the State maintains that Watson’s arguments contravene clear Indiana precedent.
However, the State’s reliance on Poore is misguided because Poore did not foreclose Criminal Rule 4(C)’s application to habitual offender rehearings. In fact, the Poore Court explicitly stated that “[w]e express no other opinion on whether [a]n habitual offender hearing is a trial for any other purposes.” Id. at 39. In other words, our Supreme Court gave no definitive opinion on Criminal Rule 4(C), meaning the rule’s enforcement in cases involving habitual offender adjudications is not prohibited.
Our Supreme Court crafted Criminal Rule 4 and its attendant provisions to provide a bright line for enforcing the requirements of a speedy trial under the Federal Constitution’s Sixth Amendment. One of those provisions established a definitive and reliable timeline within which the State must bring a person to court to answer for the charges filed against him. Thus, we conclude that the State did not abide by Criminal Rule 4(C)’s requirements to discharge a defendant if he is not brought to trial within one year. After nearly six and two-thirds years of inexplicable delay—with at least one year of delay directly attributable to the State—we find that there was a Criminal Rule 4(C) violation. Accordingly, Watson should not have been held to answer to the allegations that he is an habitual offender.
The judgment of the trial court is reversed and remanded with instructions to vacate Watson’s habitual offender status.
Crone, J., concurs. Kirsch, J., dissents with a separate opinion.
Kirsch, Judge, dissenting.
… In basing its decision on Criminal Rule 4 (C)’s mandate that no person shall be held to answer a criminal charge for a period greater that one year, the majority ignores that the one-year period set forth in the rule runs from the date of the defendant’s arrest or the date that the criminal charge is filed. Here, both of such dates had expired more than a decade prior to the Defendant’s filing his petition for post-conviction relief, and the Defendant himself sought multiple continuances of the hearing on his petition which took the proceeding outside of the one-year period.
The Defendant filed motions for continuances on January 11, 2013, September 13, 2013, June 12, 2014, March 19, 2018 and April 26, 2018, and the trial court observed that 732 days of the delay were directly attributable to the Defendant, a time delay greatly exceeding Rule 4 (C)’s one-year mandate.
Unlike the trial on a criminal charge in which the evidence is often based on the recollections of witnesses — recollections which fade with time, the evidence in the habitual offender phase is documentary and unaffected by the time lapse. I would affirm the decision of the trial court.