State v. Michael F.

Syllabus

The defendant, who had previously been convicted on pleas of guilty of various crimes in three separate cases, filed motions to open each of the disposed criminal cases in 2019. The defendant had been sentenced in 2010 and in 2013 in the underlying criminal cases. The trial court rendered judgments dismissing the motions to open, from which the defendant filed two appeals to this court. Held: 1. The trial court correctly determined that it lacked jurisdiction to consider the defendant's motions to open; under the well established common- law rule, the court lost jurisdiction following the imposition of the defendant's sentence in each of the underlying criminal cases. 2. The defendant's claim that the trial court abused its discretion when it failed to retain jurisdiction to determine the motions to open was without merit: insofar as the defendant claimed that the court had discretion to exercise jurisdiction in the present case, a court's subject matter jurisdiction is not a matter of discretion, and, as a matter of law, there simply was no jurisdiction for the court to retain; moreover, insofar as the defendant suggested that an allegation of ineffective assistance of counsel provided a trial court with continuing jurisdiction over a criminal case, this court recently rejected that proposition in State v. Jin (179 Conn. App. 185). 3. The trial court did not violate the defendant's right to due process when it dismissed his motions to open without providing him notice and an opportunity to be heard on the issue of jurisdiction, the procedures used being adequate to prevent the erroneous deprivation of the defendant's private interest in exercising his right to redress his grievances: given the defendant's claims before the trial court, there was no risk of an erroneous deprivation of any liberty interest the defendant possessed by the court proceeding as it did, the court having explained to the defendant that his motions to open had been filed in disposed cases an