Background
In 2003, Clarence King dragged the victim into an alley, repeatedly hit her, and attempted to sexually assault her. A jury convicted him of attempted sexual assault involving submission through force or violence. The conviction was a class 4 felony, and the district court imposed an indeterminate eight-years-to-life sentence under the Sex Offender Lifetime Supervision Act. His conviction and sentence were upheld on direct appeal.
King later pursued several unsuccessful collateral challenges. A clerical error had initially classified his attempted-sexual-assault conviction as a class 5 felony on the mittimus. When the district court tried to correct that error, it made another: it vacated the sentence on Count 2 and entered a conviction and sentence on Count 3, which was only a sentence enhancer.
In 2024, King filed another Crim. P. 35(c) motion challenging his conviction and sentence. The postconviction court denied the motion without a hearing.
The Court’s Holding
The Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of King’s motion. Although King’s appellate arguments differed somewhat from those below, the division addressed them because jurisdictional claims may be raised at any time and the claims were not clearly distinct from those in his motion.
The division concluded that the improper Count 3 conviction reflected a clerical error in the amended mittimus, not a genuine jurisdictional defect. It remanded under Crim. P. 36 for the mittimus to show King’s conviction on Count 2 as a class 4 felony and to remove the conviction for Count 3.
King’s remaining claims concerning the charging document, jury instructions, and proof of force or violence were barred as successive under Crim. P. 35(c). He had raised the essence of those claims in earlier proceedings, and People v. Martinez did not supply a new retroactive constitutional rule applicable to his claims.
Key Takeaways
- A mittimus may be corrected at any time to remedy a clerical mistake.
- An erroneous conviction entered on a sentence-enhancer count did not create a jurisdictional defect where the error was clerical.
- Previously litigated postconviction claims are barred as successive absent a cognizable exception.
Why It Matters
The decision distinguishes a clerical sentencing-record error from a jurisdictional error that could support postconviction relief. Courts may correct the former without disturbing the valid underlying conviction and sentence.
It also reinforces Colorado’s limits on successive Crim. P. 35(c) motions: a later case does not avoid the bar unless its new constitutional rule actually applies to the defendant’s claim and meets the rule’s retroactivity requirements.