Marcus Deangelo Lee v. State of Tennessee-Dissenting

Something rather odd appears to be happening in this case and others similar to it. It appears that this defendant pled guilty to three offenses and received an agreed-to effective sentence of three years in December 1995. His sentences should have expired in December 1998. Yet this court has either denied or dismissed this defendant’s challenges to his convictions in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. And now in 2015, almost 20 years later, we feel obligated to set this defendant’s convictions aside as illegal and allow him to withdraw his 1995 guilty pleas because he did not receive twice as much time in jail as he should have in 1995. What makes this case stranger is that it is not the State who is asking for relief; rather, the defendant complains that he did not get consecutive sentencing when he should have in 1995. It is a rare case indeed when a defendant complains about not getting more time in jail. If the defendant was seeking the remedy of serving additional jail time because the law required it at the time he pled guilty, I would be happy to oblige him. But he is not. He is attempting to have his conviction set aside and presumably to have a trial, whereupon if he is found guilty, he will have to do additional time to that ordered in 1995. What, if anything, has changed to allow such a seemingly absurd result to take place?