On July 14, 2026, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided the Somerset County case of State v. Arthur Wildgoose. The principal issue under N.J.S.A. 2C:14-2 concerned whether it would be fundamentally unjust to procedurally bar regarding the defendant’s plea offer and sentence.
Justice Pierre-Louis, my Rutgers Law classmate, wrote for a unanimous court in relevant part: Applying those principles regarding the procedural bar in Rule 3:22-4(a) and the Rule’s exceptions, we hold that defendant’s claims are procedurally barred and that no exception applies.
Defendant directly appealed his conviction and sentence in 2018. In that appeal, he raised several arguments related to the indictment, jury instructions, prosecutorial misconduct, and the length of his sentence. None of his arguments related to the Guidelines, the JLA, or NERA. In his PCR appeal, defendant argued before the Appellate Division that the procedural bar exception in Rule 3:22-4(a)(1) applied because the facts upon which his current arguments are based were outside the record, so he could not reasonably have raised those arguments in a prior proceeding. As both the PCR court and the Appellate Division found, defendant and defense counsel were well aware of the existence of the Guidelines at the time of his direct appeal. Defendant was also aware of the fact that the State did not offer him a plea prior to indictment or provide him with pre-indictment discovery. Consequently, we agree with the prior courts that the exception in Rule 3:22-4(a)(1) is not applicable. Neither is the Rule 3:22-4(a)(3) exception, which exempts a PCR petition from the procedural bar when application of the bar would be contrary to a new rule of constitutional law. No such new rule is implicated in this case.
The Appellate Division, however, found that defendant’s claims fell within Rule 3:22-4(a)(2)’s exception because, according to the court, enforcement of the procedural bar could have deprived defendant of “fair proceedings leading to a just outcome” — in other words, a fundamental injustice. We disagree.
The Appellate Division opinion was authored by Judge Ronald Susswein. He was a career prosecutor appointed to the bench by Governor Christie in 2016. Governor Christie appointed approximately 120 superior court judges during his two terms as Governor, many of who had reputations for being pro-law enforcement. He broke with more than 50 years of tradition when he refused to re-appoint Justice Wallace to the New Jersey Supreme Court, citing concerns for “judicial activism” and “legislating from the bench.”
The New Jersey Supreme Court continued in relevant part: The Appellate Division relied on a series of “what if” scenarios in determining that a fundamental injustice possibly could occur if defendant’s PCR claims were procedurally barred. The exception in Rule 3:22-4(a)(2) states that the procedural bar will not apply if doing so “would result in fundamental injustice.” (emphasis added). With no factual basis, the Appellate Division speculated that if the prosecutor acted in an arbitrary or capricious manner in declining to offer a pre-indictment plea, and if that decision — which may or may not have been arbitrary or capricious — influenced the plea offer made post-indictment, then defendant may have been deprived of fair proceedings leading to a just outcome. The problem with these suppositions is that defendant made no showing that any of this occurred or even possibly occurred.
The Appellate Division found that defendant had made “‘some showing’ that the Guidelines’ graduated plea feature raises constitutional concerns.” Under our caselaw, however, in order to vault the procedural roadblock in Rule 3:22-4(a) and succeed on a showing of a fundamental injustice, defendants must make some showing that “an error or violation ‘played a role in the determination of guilt.” Defendant, who did not even accept the plea offer in this case, and who maintained his innocence throughout his proceedings, simply has not made that showing.
Defendant never argued that his claims were exempt from the procedural bar and instead only argued exemption. Defendant’s arguments amount to general challenges to the Guidelines with no facts in the record showing that his case resulted in a fundamental injustice. Additionally, defendant’s “newly minted” arguments, as the Appellate Division labeled them, regarding the alleged conflict between the Guidelines, the JLA, and NERA as they relate to plea offers, have no bearing on a determination of defendant’s guilt because defendant rejected the plea he was offered and went to trial. PCR is not a vehicle “for investigating possible claims, but a means for vindicating actual claims.” Nothing in the record suggests that defendant was deprived of a fair proceeding or suffered an unjust outcome.
The Appellate Division appeared to base its determination of a potential fundamental injustice on multiple levels of speculation, as opposed to an actual showing by defendant that a fundamental injustice exempted his claims from the procedural bar. Such speculation cannot form the basis for a determination that the procedural bar put in place to ensure finality in cases, should be relaxed. As this Court has stressed, the fundamental injustice exception “should be applied only in exceptional circumstances.”
The Appellate Division’s determination that a fundamental injustice could have occurred here is also confounding given the fact that the State is not required to offer a defendant a plea at any time, at all. The Appellate Division acknowledged this in rejecting defendant’s due process argument, stating that “‘a defendant has no legal entitlement to compel a plea offer or a plea bargain’ because ‘the decision whether to engage in such bargaining rests with the prosecutor.'” Defendant agrees, having noted in his appellate brief that he was “not arguing that the State must make a pre-indictment plea offer.” If a defendant is not entitled to a plea offer and the State acts well within its discretion in deciding not to offer a plea, it is difficult to imagine a scenario, in the PCR setting, in which the State’s decision not to offer a plea would result in a fundamental injustice for purposes of circumventing the procedural bar. No fundamental injustice occurred in this case.
For the foregoing reasons, we find that defendant’s PCR claims are procedurally barred pursuant to Rule 3:22-4(a). The Appellate Division erred in finding that the exception applied and creating a new procedural rule in this procedurally barred appeal. The Appellate Division’s judgment is reversed.
