What can you do after reaching a plea bargain with the state, pled guilty, and in prison or on probation, and waived your right to appeal?
Remember, a Writ of Habeas Corpus is different from an appeal. So even if you waive your right to appeal your case on direct appeal to the court of appeals above that trial court, you can still file an 11.07 application for Writ of Habeas Corpus.
What the 11.07 application for Writ of Habeas Corpus does is to attack the constitutionality of your conviction. Though in most cases, what you have in a plea situation is you’ve received ineffective assistance of counsel, there was exculpatory evidence withheld from you, a victim or primary witness recants or changes their story.
In any of these situations, you can always pursue an 11.07 application of Writ of Habeas Corpus. It does not matter whether you admit that you are guilty of this offense or not. And it does not mean that your case would be worse when it comes back if you were to prevail.
Now when pursuing the 11.07 application, it does not matter whether you’re guilty or not, what matters is whether the requirements of your case were met when you plead guilty. Your lawyer may have flopped with investigating the law or the facts. He may have misunderstood the law or the facts related to your case.
You may have pled guilty and you pled guilty in a case that ends up becoming a mandatory half-time sentence (also called a 3G sentence or aggravated sentence). There you have to serve half of your time before you’re eligible for parole. If your lawyer gave you bad advice on that issue and if he had given you correct advice, you would not have pled guilty you are entitled to relief. So you could have received ineffective assistance of counsel in that way.
Also, you could have an attorney that didn’t do a full investigation, he didn’t contact witnesses or attempt to put together mitigation evidence for your case to convince the prosecutor or the judge about getting you a lighter sentence.
It may be that the police or the prosecutor withheld some very important piece of evidence that would’ve shown that you’re less likely to be guilty of that, and that would have influenced the way that the plea bargains played out, or it would have resulted in you going to trial. `
Your lawyer may not have recognized that you had a right to a motion to suppress that should’ve been filed, had he won, the case would’ve been dismissed.
Those are all things that you can still pursue, regardless of whether you’re guilty or not, whether you pled guilty or not, whether you’ve confessed and whatever the case is because it can always be different.
When those cases are reversed after the 11.07 Writ application, many times, several years have gone by, the players are all different, witnesses have moved, lawyers, the defense attorney or the prosecutor may have changed, the judge may have changed.
All of these people don’t care about your case anymore.
The only thing they care about is getting it off their docket.
So it’s worth taking a shot.
If you’ve pled guilty and you think there are grounds that would support you get a new trial granted in your case, then you should certainly pursue an 11.07 because you are achieving an upper hand in that situation.
About The Attorney
Jacob Blizzard is board certified in both criminal law and criminal appellate law.
He regularly practices in the areas of state and federal criminal defense, criminal appeals, post conviction writs of habeas corpus.
In Texas, there are more than 100,000 attorneys licensed to practice, but only 7,450 are board certified.
In the entire State of Texas, as of the 2019 certification year, there were only 87 attorneys board certified in both criminal law and criminal appellate law, making Mr. Blizzard one of 0.087% of attorneys in Texas to hold both of those certifications.
