Background
A jury convicted Michael Orlando Rollie of three counts of attempted manslaughter, attempted first degree murder, multiple assault counts, and related crime-of-violence counts. He received an aggregate 104-year Department of Corrections sentence. The Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed his convictions on direct appeal, and the mandate issued in July 2013.
Rollie later filed numerous unsuccessful postconviction motions and appeals. In May 2025, he filed another Crim. P. 35(c) motion, arguing that the direct-appeal division had wrongly handled his claims that a victim lunged at him before he acted in self-defense and that surveillance video had been edited to remove evidence of that lunge. He sought an evidentiary hearing to prove self-defense through asserted exculpatory evidence.
The Court’s Holding
The court affirmed the summary denial of Rollie’s motion. It explained that the jury—not the division deciding his direct appeal—resolved whether Rollie acted in self-defense. The earlier division addressed only evidentiary and jury-instruction issues related to that defense, and it did not find that the surveillance video was unedited; it held only that the trial court had not abused its discretion in admitting it over Rollie’s completeness objection.
Rollie’s motion did not present a cognizable basis for relief or for an evidentiary hearing. The law-of-the-case doctrine does not independently permit relitigation of settled issues or exempt a defendant from Crim. P. 35(c)’s procedural bars. To the extent he again claimed actual innocence based on self-defense or altered video evidence, those claims were successive because they had been, or could have been, raised previously. He also did not allege newly discoverable evidence unavailable through due diligence; instead, he largely relied on trial evidence.
Key Takeaways
- A law-of-the-case argument is not a stand-alone vehicle for relitigating issues decided on appeal.
- Successive postconviction claims must be denied unless a recognized exception applies.
- A request for a hearing based on purported exculpatory evidence must identify a viable, nonprocedurally barred claim.
Why It Matters
The decision underscores the strict limits on repeated Colorado postconviction litigation. A defendant cannot avoid successiveness rules by recasting previously litigated self-defense or evidence arguments as a challenge to the appellate court’s earlier analysis.