Bankston v. State

Clinton Bankston pleaded guilty but mentally ill in 1988 to murdering five people, crimes he committed at ages 15 and 16, and received five consecutive life sentences. In 2019, more than thirty years later, he filed his own motion asking a Clarke County court to vacate his convictions and let him withdraw his guilty pleas, arguing his lawyer had been ineffective and that the court had failed to follow proper procedures. The trial court rejected the request to vacate his convictions on the merits and separately ruled it had no power to let him withdraw his pleas because too much time had passed. On appeal, the Supreme Court of Georgia agreed that the withdrawal request came far too late for any court to consider. But it found the trial court used the wrong procedure on the vacate request: rather than deciding it on the merits, the court should have simply dismissed it, because Georgia law does not allow this kind of motion to vacate a conviction at all.

A motion to vacate a criminal conviction is not a recognized legal remedy and must be dismissed rather than decided on its merits, and a trial court loses jurisdiction to allow withdrawal of a guilty plea once the court term in which the defendant was sentenced has ended.

The ruling reaffirms that Georgia defendants cannot revisit old guilty pleas or convictions decades later through a motion to vacate, and that any attempt to withdraw a plea must happen within the same court term as sentencing, closing off a route some inmates try to use long after conviction.

Affirmed in part, vacated in part, and remanded with direction

1. A motion to vacate a conviction is not an authorized procedure in Georgia criminal cases; courts have held such motions are a legal nullity that should be dismissed outright rather than ruled on.
2. Because the trial court instead denied Bankston's vacate request on the merits, the Supreme Court of Georgia vacated that portion of the ruling and sent the case back with instructions to dismiss it instead, since no appeal can be taken from a dismissal of a nullity motion.
3. Separately, Georgia law holds that a trial court's power to let a defendant withdraw a guilty plea ends once the term of court in which he was sentenced has expired.
4. Because Bankston was sentenced in 1988 and the court term from that year ended decades before his 2019 motion, the trial court had no jurisdiction to consider his request to withdraw his guilty pleas, so dismissal of that part was correct.

• guilty plea withdrawal
• murder conviction
• juvenile offender
• motion to vacate
• jurisdiction of trial court