Molter, J.
When a defendant pleads guilty, they cannot challenge their conviction through a direct appeal; they must instead pursue post-conviction relief. Tumulty v. State, 666 N.E.2d 394, 395–96 (Ind. 1996). We grant transfer to revisit whether that rule should apply when a defendant pleads guilty to multiple counts but appeals arguing that double jeopardy requires vacating a lesser included conviction. And we conclude we don’t need to deviate from our rule because other precedents already chart an alternate route to a direct appeal: A defendant can move to withdraw their plea (only as to the lesser included offense), include a request that the trial court vacate the lesser included conviction, and then directly appeal the denial of that motion.
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The seminal case for the rule prohibiting a direct appeal following a guilty plea is Tumulty v. State, 666 N.E.2d 394 (Ind. 1996). In that case, the defendant pleaded guilty without a plea agreement to criminal deviate conduct, two counts of battery, and being a habitual offender. He then appealed and argued “there was no factual basis in support of” the habitual offender charge. Id. at 395. Our Court affirmed based on the “long-standing prohibition against challenging a guilty plea by direct appeal.” Id. And we explained that the appropriate avenue to challenge the conviction was instead through post-conviction relief. Id. at 396.
There are several reasons for the rule. One is that post-conviction relief proceedings facilitate factual development that is not available through a direct appeal. Id. Another is the concern for finality, since “the plea as a legal act brings to a close the dispute between the parties, much as settling civil parties do by submitting an agreed judgment.” Id. Yet another reason is that nearly all criminal cases resolve through a guilty plea, and allowing a direct appeal after the plea would have “the potential to multiply dramatically the caseload in the appellate courts by offering appeals to thousands of admitted felons.” Id. And still another reason is that imposing a clear, straightforward rule for resolving the vast majority of cases yields a more efficient judicial system, “the benefit of most bright line tests.” Mayo v. State, 681 N.E.2d 689, 695 (Ind. 1997) (Shepard, C.J., concurring).
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Still, there is no need to revisit cases like Tumulty, Hayes, and Mapp because our precedent already offers an alternate route to a direct appeal that subsumes Monroe’s proposed rule. We’ve held that those cases do not bar a direct appeal of an order denying a motion to withdraw a guilty plea. Mapp, 770 N.E.2d at 334 n.1; Brightman v. State, 758 N.E.2d 41, 44 (Ind. 2001). Just as Tumulty’s rule applies to double jeopardy arguments, so too do the rule’s limits.
Thus, when a trial court mistakenly enters rather than vacates a judgment of conviction on a lesser included offense following a guilty plea, and the defendant did not agree to that through a plea agreement establishing which convictions would be entered or subject to sentencing, the defendant should move to withdraw the guilty plea. The motion should be limited to the guilty plea on only the lesser included offense, and the motion should also ask the trial court to vacate only that conviction. See Ind. Code § 35-38-1-6.
Whether before or after sentencing, a court must permit the defendant to withdraw a guilty plea “whenever the defendant proves the withdrawal of the plea is necessary to correct a manifest injustice.” I.C. § 35-35-1-4(b) (before sentencing); I.C. § 35-35-1-4(c) (same standard after sentencing).2 The “withdrawal of the plea is necessary to correct a manifest injustice whenever . . . the plea and judgment of conviction are void or voidable.” I.C. § 35-35-1-4(c). A “voidable judgment” is one that “although seemingly valid, is defective in some material way,” especially “a judgment that, although rendered by a court having jurisdiction, is irregular or erroneous.” Judgment, Black’s Law Dictionary (12th ed. 2024). A materially defective judgment would include one that runs afoul of double jeopardy protections. See A.W. v. State, 229 N.E.3d 1060, 1073 (Ind. 2024) (holding that “the juvenile court’s multiple adjudications violate the substantive prohibition against double jeopardy, and the adjudication that A.W. committed ‘dangerous possession of a firearm’ must be vacated”).
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Because a double jeopardy violation would qualify as a manifest injustice, the questions of whether there was a double jeopardy violation and whether there was an abuse of discretion would be one and the same. If there was a double jeopardy violation, then there would also be an abuse of discretion in denying the motion, and the appellate court should reverse and remand with instructions to grant the motion and vacate the lesser included conviction. On the other hand, if there was no double jeopardy violation, then there was no abuse of discretion, and the appellate court should affirm.
This gets to the same place as Monroe’s proposal, which is to allow “defendants that plead guilty to the charging document without the benefit of any agreement to challenge their conviction on double jeopardy grounds on direct appeal.” Pet. to Trans. at 8. But first funneling these claims through a motion to withdraw offers two benefits. One is less disruption to our precedents, as this is the framework that Tumulty and then Brightman built. And the other benefit is that a motion to withdraw creates an opportunity to develop a more robust factual record in the trial court, which is why we held in Brightman that Tumulty does not bar a direct appeal challenging an order denying a motion to withdraw a guilty plea. Brightman, 758 N.E.2d at 44 (distinguishing Tumulty in part because “the trial court heard evidence on the motion, reviewed the claim, and rejected it”). Indeed, if the defendant files the motion after sentencing, the trial court must treat the motion as a petition for post-conviction relief. I.C. § 35-35-1-4(c).
In this case, Monroe did not file a motion to withdraw the guilty plea as to a lesser included conviction. A direct appeal is therefore unavailable, and any remedy must come through post-conviction relief.
In sum, we decline Monroe’s invitation to adjust our limits on direct appeals. Because Monroe did not move to withdraw the guilty plea on the robbery conviction, we hold the conviction cannot be challenged through a direct appeal, and we summarily affirm the Court of Appeals’ other holdings rejecting Monroe’s challenges to the sentence.
Rush, C.J., and Massa and Slaughter, JJ., concur.
Goff, J., dissents with separate opinion.
Goff, J., dissenting.
Under our long-standing rule in Tumulty v. State, a guilty plea waives the right to challenge on direct appeal a conviction on double-jeopardy grounds, requiring the defendant, with certain exceptions, to raise his claim in a petition for post-conviction relief. Three principal reasons motivate this rule: the frequent insufficiency of facts adduced at a guilty plea hearing to resolve a fact-sensitive double-jeopardy claim on direct appeal, the need to ensure finality of the dispute, and the importance of promoting judicial economy by limiting the appellate caseload. The defendant here urges us to reconsider Tumulty’s application in cases where, like hers, a defendant pleads guilty without the benefit of a plea agreement with the State, and the existing record suffices for an appellate court to resolve the double-jeopardy claim. Strict adherence to Tumulty in those circumstances, she contends, undermines its policies of finality and judicial economy.
The Court today finds “no need to revisit” Tumulty “because our precedent already offers an alternate route to a direct appeal” for guilty plea defendants who question the propriety of the State’s charges: the motion to withdraw a guilty plea. Although I agree that this procedure will suffice in most cases, I see no need to treat the Tumulty rule as so strict and inflexible as to preclude the relief sought here. After all, the alternate route endorsed by the Court is itself an exception to the Tumulty rule. In my view, a guilty-plea defendant should be able to raise a double jeopardy claim on direct appeal if the alleged violation arose after entry of the guilty plea, the defendant never agreed to the alleged violation, an appellate court can resolve the claim based on the existing record, and there’s no legitimate dispute over the factual basis supporting the conviction. And because the circumstances here meet these criteria, I would remand to the Court of Appeals to consider the defendant’s double-jeopardy claim on the merits.
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The Tumulty rule, as noted above, rests on three principal policy reasons: the need for an adequate factual record to resolve the defendant’s claim, which an appellate court, ill-equipped to conduct its own factual inquiry, may find lacking; the desire to ensure finality of the dispute; and the primacy of promoting judicial economy by limiting the appellate caseload. 666 N.E.2d at 396.
The first of these policy reasons involves the factual-basis requirement, which “ensures that a person who pleads guilty truly is guilty.” Butler v. State, 658 N.E.2d 72, 76 (Ind. 1995). Accordingly, a trial court may not enter judgment on a guilty plea “unless it is satisfied from its examination of the defendant or the evidence presented that there is a factual basis for the plea.” Ind. Code § 35-35-1-3(b).
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At the same time, the factual-basis requirement plays an important role in safeguarding against potential double-jeopardy violations. An inquiry by the court, for example, should ensure the defendant comprehends the “nature of the charge,” assist him in understanding “that his conduct” or actions “actually fall within the charge” to which he’s pleading guilty, and increase “the visibility of charge reduction practices.” Butler, 658 N.E.2d at 76 (internal citation and quotation marks omitted). If the facts adduced during the plea colloquy reveal the potential for impermissibly cumulative punishment, the defendant may challenge the propriety of the charges, see, e.g., Idle v. State, 587 N.E.2d 712, 715 (Ind. Ct. App. 1992), trans. denied, the State may agree to drop one of the charges (like here), or the trial court may elect to enter judgment of conviction on fewer than all charged offenses, see, e.g., Thompson, 82 N.E.3d at 379–80.
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Still, courts on direct appeal regularly conduct fact-sensitive inquiries under the Tumulty rule’s sentencing exception. Indiana’s sentencing-cap statute limits the aggregate sentence a trial court can impose for multiple nonviolent convictions arising out of the same “episode of criminal conduct.” I.C. § 35-50-1-2(d). The statute defines an “episode of criminal conduct” as “offenses or a connected series of offenses that are closely related in time, place, and circumstance.” I.C. § 35-50-1-2(b). The factual analysis necessary for deciding whether multiple offenses constitute an “episode of criminal conduct”—akin to a factual analysis in a double jeopardy claim—has presented few, if any, challenges to appellate courts when analyzing a defendant’s post-guilty-plea sentencing claim. See, e.g., Gober v. State, 163 N.E.3d 347, 352, 357 (Ind. Ct. App. 2021), trans. denied; Yost v. State, 150 N.E.3d 610, 612, 615 (Ind. Ct. App. 2020).
Finally, it’s worth briefly discussing the tension between Tumulty and federal precedent as another reason for rejecting a strict adherence to the Tumulty rule. Under federal law, a valid guilty plea forecloses a collateral attack on the defendant’s convictions except “where on the face of the record the court had no power to enter the conviction or impose the sentence.” United States v. Broce, 488 U.S. 563, 569 (1989); see also Menna v. New York, 423 U.S. 61, 62–63 n.2 (1975) (holding that a guilty plea “does not waive a claim that—judged on its face—the charge is one which the State may not constitutionally prosecute” and remanding for consideration of the defendant’s double-jeopardy claim on the merits). Thus, a guilty-plea defendant may raise a federal constitutional claim on direct appeal, so long as the alleged violation didn’t occur “prior to the entry of the guilty plea” and so long as the defendant’s claim doesn’t contradict the plea agreement and can be “resolved without any need to venture beyond th[e] record.” Class v. United States, 583 U.S. 174, 181 (2018) (internal citation and quotation marks omitted). See, e.g., Griffin v. State, 540 N.E.2d 1187, 1188 (Ind. 1989) (citing Menna for the proposition that, under the federal constitution, a defendant who pled guilty to “facially duplicative” charges may “challenge the resulting convictions” on direct appeal); Jordan v. State, 676 N.E.2d 352, 354 (Ind. Ct. App. 1997) (citing Broce, Menna, and Griffin for the same proposition).
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For one thing, despite the protections recognized in Broce, Menna, and Class (and despite common misperceptions), the federal constitution contains no right to appellate review of a criminal conviction. Marc M. Arkin, Rethinking the Constitutional Right to a Criminal Appeal, 39 UCLA L. Rev. 503, 504 (1992) (citing Pennsylvania v. Finley, 481 U.S. 551 (1987)). All the more reason, then, to recognize commensurate protections when our state constitution expressly guarantees “in all cases an absolute right to one appeal.” Ind. Const. art. 7, § 6. What’s more, the principle under federal law that permits a collateral attack on direct appeal unless the alleged violation occurred “prior to the entry of the guilty plea,” Class, 583 U.S. at 181 (emphasis added), aligns fully with the defendant’s reasonable expectation, under Indiana law, that, at the time of her guilty plea, the trial court will subsequently impose its sentence and enter judgment of conviction “in accordance with the law,” Crider, 984 N.E.2d at 625.
For the reasons above, I see no need to treat the Tumulty rule as so strict and inflexible as to preclude relief in every case. In my view, a guilty-plea defendant should be able to raise a double-jeopardy claim on direct appeal if (1) the alleged violation arose after entry of the guilty plea, (2) the defendant never agreed to the alleged violation, (3) an appellate court can resolve the claim based on the existing record, and (4) there’s no legitimate dispute over the factual basis supporting the conviction.
In my view, this case meets the criteria set forth above for departing from Tumulty’s application.
First, the alleged violation—the trial court’s improper entry of judgment of convictions—arose after Monroe pled guilty. Second, absent a written plea agreement with the State, Monroe never agreed to the alleged violation. To be sure, while Monroe advised the trial court at the change-of-plea hearing that the parties had agreed to “merge” the felony-murder count with the murder count, she raised no objection to the murder and F2 robbery counts as presenting a similar double-jeopardy problem, arguably resulting in waiver of the issue. However, at the sentencing hearing, the trial court expressly declined to find the double-jeopardy issue waived, and the parties argued the merits of the claim at length. Tr. Vol. 2, p. 47.
Third, an appellate court can resolve Monroe’s claim based on the existing record. At her guilty-plea hearing, the trial court recited the counts as charged by the State and both parties asked Monroe questions to establish a factual basis for the convictions—where the offenses occurred, how they unfolded, the scope of Monroe’s involvement, etc. Then, “to supplement the stipulated factual basis,” the State offered the probable cause affidavit—a four-page document detailing the investigation, the statements from both defendants, and their description of the offenses. Id. at 19; App. Vol. 2, pp. 20–23. Of course, the facts adduced at a full-fledged trial or at a post-conviction hearing will almost certainly exceed the facts adduced at a guilty-plea hearing. See Butler, 658 N.E.2d at 77 (a guilty-plea hearing need not amount to “a veritable bench trial”). But that didn’t stop the State from raising double-jeopardy arguments in its sentencing memorandum.
Finally, there’s no legitimate dispute over the factual basis supporting the conviction. Despite its insistence now that a double-jeopardy claim “is a fact-sensitive inquiry that is properly addressed after a hearing” on postconviction, Opp. to Trans. at 12, the State itself agreed in its sentencing memorandum that, “based on the facts of [Monroe’s] case and the facts adduced from the charging information,” her conviction for murder in the perpetration of a robbery, as an included offense of murder under Wadle v. State, should be vacated to avoid a double-jeopardy violation. App. Vol. 2, pp. 86–87. Indeed, the State explicitly engaged in a fact-sensitive inquiry under Wadle, concluding that the “two offenses are ‘compressed in terms of time, place, singleness of purpose, and continuity of action as to constitute a single transaction.’” Id. at 87 (quoting Wadle). Given the State’s reliance on the existing record to make a double-jeopardy argument in proceedings before the trial court, principles of fairness dictate that Monroe should be able to rely on the same record to resolve her double jeopardy claim on direct appeal.
For the reasons above, I would hold that Tumulty does not preclude Monroe from proceeding with her double-jeopardy claim on direct appeal, and I would remand to the Court of Appeals to consider her double-jeopardy claim on the merits.