PEOPLE v. HAYES (2026)

By Indictment No. 70087-24 (the “Indictment”), the defendant is charged with sixty-two counts  ¹ of Criminal Sexual Act in the Third Degree in violation of Section 130.40(1) of the Penal Law, a class E felony, and three counts  ² of Rape in the Third Degree in violation of Section 130.25(1) of the Penal Law, a Class E felony. It is alleged that between 2021 and 2022 the defendant engaged in oral sexual conduct with eight individuals and sexual intercourse with two individuals, all of whom were incapable of consent by reason of their incarceration at Brookwood Secure Center for Youth in the Town of Claverack, Columbia County. Brookwood Secure Center for Youth is a secure detention facility under the administration and oversight of the New York State Office of Children and Family Services.

BACKGROUND

On June 25, 2025, the defendant entered a negotiated plea of guilty to a single count of Criminal Sexual Act in the Third Degree, as charged in Count One of the Indictment, in full satisfaction thereof. Insofar as the agreement left sentencing to the court's discretion, the defendant's plea was conditioned only upon the waiver of her right to appeal. The court noted that a conviction of Criminal Sexual Act in the Third Degree carries with it the potential for incarceration for a determinate period of one and a half to four years, however, in view of the considerable collateral consequences of the defendant's felony conviction  ³ , without objection from either party, the court committed to a maximum sentence of incarceration of two and one-half years with ten years’ post-release supervision. Thereupon, the court and the defendant engaged in the following colloquy:

THE COURT: Dr. Hayes, you have been asked to plead to Criminal Sexual Act, a class E felony, in violation of § 130.40(1) of the Penal Law, which is Count One of the Indictment. Under that count, it is charged that on or about August [20]22 and October [20]22 at Brookwood Secure Center, located in the County of Columbia, State of New York, you engaged in oral sexual conduct with a person who is incapable of consent. Specifically, you engaged in oral sexual conduct with an individual with the initials of J.D.4 who is incapable of consenting; is that true?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, Your Honor.

THE COURT: Therefore, how do you plead to Criminal Sexual Act in the Third Degree, a class E felony, in violation of § 130.40(1) of the Penal Law of the State of New York?

THE DEFENDANT: Guilty.

As a matter of course, the court proceeded to advise the defendant that the court's sentencing commitment was conditional in nature. She would be required to meet with the Probation Department in connection with its pre-sentence investigation (see CPL § 390.20), return to court as scheduled, and refrain from committing any new offenses prior to sentencing. In the event of her failure to adhere to these conditions, the court would not be bound by its commitment, and she would not be permitted to withdraw her plea.

On September 2, 2025, the Probation Department filed its pre-sentence investigation report. The report contained a statement given by the defendant during her in-person interview, supplemented by a two-page letter she subsequently authored. In her statement, the defendant described J.D.'s behavior on three separate occasions as causing her to feel “intimidated” and “concerned for her safety.” The defendant acknowledged communicating with J.D. by way of a contraband cell phone in October 2022, but gave no indication that, to that point, their relationship had become sexual in nature. The first sexual contact the defendant described having with J.D. was later that month when J.D. “came into [her] office uninvited and raped [her].” The defendant explained that this experience left her “ashamed” and “traumatized” and that she responded by doing “whatever J.D. said as he subsequently threatened harm to [her] younger brother who has special needs.” This apparently included the electronic transmission of sex acts from her home, which she acknowledged performing because she felt “helpless, cornered and scared” and in “survival mode.” In her lengthy narrative, the defendant made no reference to any acts of oral sexual conduct with J.D., but she stated generally that concerns for her safety and the safety of her brother, together with the trauma of her assault, “prevented [her] from thinking rationally.” Though, theoretically, the act of oral sexual conduct to which the defendant pled could have pre-dated her alleged rape, the court — quite reasonably, it believes — interpreted the defendant's statement as to her circumstances and thought processes as explanatory of her criminal conduct, presumably offered in mitigation thereof for purposes of sentencing. It is, of course, the court's responsibility to consider all relevant sentencing factors, be they aggravating or mitigating (see People v Farrar, 52 NYS2d 302, 305-306 [1981]). The challenge here, from the court's perspective, was that accepting the defendant's recitation as true — particularly with respect to her state of mind — would effectively negate her criminal culpability. Therefore, the court was constrained to either disregard the defendant's statement as unworthy of credibility and proceed with sentencing, or inquire further. When the parties appeared before the court for sentencing on September 10, 2025, the court proceeded with the latter.

On examination by the court, the defendant confirmed having engaged in oral sexual conduct with J.D. and having previously admitted such conduct as charged in Count One of the Indictment. So as to reconcile the defendant's guilty plea with the content of her statement, the court further inquired, in pertinent part, as follows:

THE COURT: [W]ith regard to the sexual acts you admitted guilt to, was this as a result of [J.D.'s] threats to harm your younger brother?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes

․

THE COURT: You state in your letter, ‘In my mind, I felt hopeless, cornered and scared.’ Does that refer to the acts you pled guilty to in Count One of the Indictment?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, Your Honor.

THE COURT: You further state that, ‘It's hard to think rationally when you're the victim of a rape. I was in survivor mode.’ Does that also relate to the acts which you pled guilty to in Count One of the Indictment?

THE DEFENDANT: They do, yes.

THE COURT: When you state, ‘My trauma prevented me from thinking rationally,’ what were you referring to?

THE DEFENDANT: The fact that I'm a psychologist [and] I am in a position of authority at that facility and that in no reasonable world what happened would be ok, but I also was victimized and I didn't know what to do. I had never experienced anything like that before, and I was traumatized, and I was scared, and in a perfect world I would have been like ‘Are you insane?’ but I was scared. I didn't — that's not — in a state where I never been raped. I would never have done that. I would never ever.

The defendant appearing to have confirmed the accuracy of her prior representations, defense counsel interjected:

MR. DONALDSON: I'm listening and I understand your questions, which I believe are clear. I do not believe my client is hearing them clearly because I know emphatically the facts and narrative as she has described and she has told me thousands of times. I do not believe there's accuracy in regard to your questions and her answers

THE COURT: What is [the] inaccuracy? Is the inaccuracy in my questions or in the answers?

MR. DONALDSON: No, no, no. In the answers, not your questions. Your questions, they're quite clear. I believe that she's answering them inaccurately.

․

THE COURT: She is an educated person. She seems — obviously, she's emotional and that's understandable under the circumstances. We don't fault her for that, but she is answering the questions clearly and cognizantly. I appreciate you trying to rehabilitate her for lack of a better term. Maybe that's an improper term. I apologize if it is, but its’ — in all due respect, we're not here to hear your argument, we're here to hear your client's testimony.

Thereupon, defense counsel inquired of the defendant:

MR. DONALDSON: Dr. Hayes, on June 25th when you were in this courtroom and you admitted guilt to Count One of the Indictment, were you, in fact, guilty, yes or no?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

MR. DONALDSON: That act, that Count One says that you committed the act of oral sex upon another person who was in that facility and unable to consent; is that true, yes or no?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

․

MR. DONALDSON: In [your] letter, you referenced being coerced by J.D., correct?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

MR. DONALDSON: Did you and J.D. have sexual relations more than once, yes or no?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

MR. DONALDSON: Was one of those times the rape that you referenced?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

MR. DONALDSON: Was another time non-coerced, where you had sexual relations with him without it being coerced, correct?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

․

MR. DONALDSON: When you referenced being coerced, that was with regard to the rape, correct?

THE DEFENDANT: That's correct.

․

MR. DONALDSON: I believe what the court wants to know is, are you saying unequivocally without any qualification, you're guilty as charged for Count One?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

MR. DONALDSON: And that Count One was something you did without being coerced?

THE DEFENDANT: That is accurate, yes.

It should be noted that, despite their expressed concerns both prior to and subsequent the defendant's examination, the People made no application for vacatur of the defendant's plea or for departure from the court's sentence commitment. The defendant's contradictory statements on examination further graying the cloud of doubt as to her guilt, the court vacated the defendant's plea over her objection and restored the case to its pre-plea status. On November 19, 2025, a Huntley hearing was held, following which the court issued a decision and order suppressing approximately ninety minutes of the defendant's two-hour and twelve-minute-long audio-recorded interview by State Police. The defendant and the People have moved for renewal (CPLR 2221[e]) and re-argument (see CPLR 2221[d]), respectively; the defendant seeking reinstatement of her plea of guilty, the People modification of the court's Huntley ruling.

ANALYSIS

Addressing first the defense motion, it has been long and consistently held that where the defendant's recitation of the facts underlying the crime pleaded to clearly casts significant doubt upon the defendant's guilt or otherwise calls into question the voluntariness of the plea, the trial court has a duty to inquire further to ensure that defendant's guilty plea is knowing and voluntary (People v Francis, 38 NY2d 150, 153 [1975]; People v Beasley, 25 NY2d 483, 487-488 [1969]; People v Serrano, 15 NY2d 304, 309 [1965]; and People v Harris, 61 NY2d 9 [1983]). Generally, “a defendant must preserve a challenge to the voluntariness of their plea by moving either to withdraw the plea under CPL § 220.60(3) or to vacate the judgment of conviction under CPL § 440.10” (People v Scott 44 NY3d 302, 306 [2025]). However, “where the court fails in this duty and accepts the plea without further inquiry, the defendant may challenge the sufficiency of the allocution on direct appeal, notwithstanding that a formal post-allocution motion was not made” (People v Lopez, 71 NY2d 662, 666 [1988]). The “narrow exception” to the preservation rule articulated in Lopez is, obviously, inapplicable here. This does not, however, render impertinent the entirety of the analytical framework. Examination of the court's response first requires consideration as to whether the defendant's exculpatory statements — specifically, their timing — triggered the court's duty to inquire, and with it, the implicit authority to reject the plea of a defendant whose statements cast “significant doubt” upon their guilt. If the court's inquiry was not required, the question becomes whether vacatur of the defendant's plea was nevertheless discretionary in light of her post-plea claims of duress (CPL § 40.00).

In Lopez, the statements giving rise to the court's duty to inquire were made in the context of the defendant's plea allocution. In the years since, efforts to extend the court's duty to post-plea statements, thereby expanding the exception to the preservation rule, gave rise to a split at the Appellate Division (compare People v Dupree, 235 AD2d 120, 122-123 [1st Dept 2025]; People v Anderson, 170 AD3d 878 [2d Dept 2019]; People v Gresham, 151 AD3d 1175, 1178 [3d Dept 2017]; and People v Brown, 204 AD3d 1519, 1519-1520 [4th Dept 2022]). As an initial matter, applying the Third Department's holding in Gresham, the court was undoubtedly correct in holding a hearing to inquire as to the defendant's post-plea statements in lieu of proceeding directly to sentencing.

However, as the People concede, defendant made statements at sentencing that cast doubt upon his guilt and the voluntariness of his plea, and County Court failed to satisfy its duty of engaging in a further inquiry to ensure that defendant's plea was knowing and voluntary ․ In addition, the Court of Appeals has recognized that a defendant may negate an element of the crime to which a plea has been entered or make a statement suggestive of an involuntary plea at post-plea proceedings, including sentencing, which may require the trial court to then conduct a further inquiry or give the defendant an opportunity to withdraw the plea (People v Gresham, 151 AD3d at 1177-1178).

As fate would have it, five months later, in People v Rios, the Court of Appeals would settle the question definitively.

We now resolve the split and hold that the defendant's post-plea statements at sentencing challenging the factual basis of his plea did not trigger the Lopez exception to the preservation doctrine. Despite what defendant suggests, we never held (in People v Pastor, 28 NY3d 1089 [2016]) that the duty to inquire and the exception to the preservation doctrine that flows from that duty applies to post-plea statements made during sentencing. That issue was not before us. Now that the issue presents itself, we hold that statements made at sentencing challenging the factual basis of a plea do not trigger the duty to inquire (People v Rios, ––– NE3d ––––, 2026 NY Slip Op. 00963 [2026]).

Turning now to the application of CPLR 2221, the court notes that the Criminal Procedure Law offers no mechanism by which a party may request leave to renew or reargue prior applications. Where no applicable provision of the CPL exists, those provisions of the CPLR governing the issue at hand may be applied in a criminal action (People v Merly, 51 Misc 3d 858, 860 [Sup Ct, Bronx Co. 2016]). As relevant here, CPLR 2221[e][2] provides that a motion for leave to renew “shall demonstrate that there has been a change in the law that would change the prior determination.” As to the merits of the defendant's application, under Gresham the court was obligated to inquire, whereas under Rios, it is decidedly not. Therefore, the court finds the Rios holding, as applicable to the matter sub judice, constitutes a change in law and provides a sufficient basis for the defendant's motion to renew (see CPLR 2221[e][2]; see also Dinallo v DAL Electric, 60 AD3d 620 [2d Dept 2009]). The more nuanced question is whether this change in the law compels a different conclusion.

As relevant here, Rios merely holds that trial courts have no affirmative obligation to explore — and potentially vacate — a defendant's plea when their post-plea attestations of fact cast doubt upon their guilt. Insofar as, in light of Rios, inquiry and determination were not required in this case, the court must now consider whether vacatur of a plea is discretionary, and if so, under what circumstances. If, indeed, vacatur is a matter of discretion and was here warranted as a matter of law, it cannot be said that the Rios holding would have changed the outcome, in which case the defendant's motion under CPLR 2221[e][2] must be denied.

“It is well settled that, in the absence of fraud, misrepresentation, deceit or trickery, courts have no inherent power to set aside a plea of guilty absent the defendant's consent (People v Prato, 89 AD2d 860 [2d Dept 1982]) other than to correct their own mistakes” (Matter of Kurz v Justices of the Supreme Ct of NY, Kings Co., 228 AD2d 74, 76-77 [2d Dept 1997]). Post-plea protestations of innocence reflected in a pre-sentence investigation report do not rise to this level (People v Prato, 89 AD2d 860 [2d Dept 1982]) (holding the court could not sua sponte vacate the defendant's guilty plea because the probation report stated that the defendant denied involvement in the crime charged). Nor does the post-plea assertion of facts supporting an affirmative defense (People v Brown, 152 AD3d 715, 715-716) [2d Dept 2017]) (holding the sentencing court acted in excess of its authority in vacating the defendant's guilty plea where, post-plea, the defendant claimed he had no recollection of the events because he was highly intoxicated at the time of the charged conduct). Vacatur will not, however, be disturbed when the defendant ratifies his or her post-plea claims of innocence at sentencing and stands silently by while the court sets aside the plea agreement (People v Harris, 118 AD2d 583 [2d Dept 1986]). In Harris, it was observed that the defendant “failed in any way to challenge the vacatur of his guilty plea in an appropriate manner at a time when the issue was subject to expeditious resolution. This was not a situation where the record reflects an intent by the defendant to stand by his guilty plea as theretofore bargained” (id. at 585). The defendant's vigorous challenge to vacatur, both in the courtroom and in connection with this application, renders Harris distinguishable. In her plea colloquy, the defendant was asked whether she engaged in oral sexual conduct with J.D. When she responded in the affirmative, she was “therefore” asked how she pleads to the charge of Criminal Sexual Act in the Third Degree in violation of § 130.40(1) of the Penal Law, a criminal statute containing no scienter element. Her response was, simply, “guilty.” Despite inquiring as to whether the defendant had an opportunity to discuss her plea with counsel, the court cannot and will not impute upon the defendant the legal acumen necessary to find that her plea and subsequent statements were components of a broader scheme to obtain a favorable plea and/or sentence. Absent discernable fraud, misrepresentation, deception or trick perpetrated by the defendant, the court is without discretion to vacate the defendant's plea of guilty.

CONCLUSION

It is the role of the court to administer justice in accordance with the law. It is not the court's province to substitute its judgment for that of the state legislature or courts of higher authority. Under then-controlling precedent, the court was required to inquire further as to the defendant's post-plea statements. On the basis of this inquiry and in the exercise of the court's discretion, the plea was vacated. Had Rios earlier supplanted Gresham as binding upon this court, the court would have been compelled to determine that inquiry into and vacatur of the defendant's plea were neither required nor discretionary under the circumstances. Since the Rios holding compels a different outcome than that under Gresham, the defendant's motion for leave to renew must be granted and the defendant's plea of guilty to Count One of the Indictment reinstated.

Accordingly, it is hereby

ORDERED that in light of the Court of Appeals’ decision in People v Rios (––– NE3d ––––, 2026 NY Slip. Op. 00963 [2026]), the defendant's motion for leave to renew pursuant to CPLR 2221[e][2] is granted; and it is further

ORDERED that upon renewal and having determined that the defendant's post-plea statements did not, as a matter of law, trigger further inquiry; and having determined that the defendant's post-plea statements did not, as a matter of law, furnish a basis for the court to vacate the defendant's plea over her objection, the court hereby reinstates the defendant's plea of guilty to Count One of the Indictment on all of the terms and conditions pronounced by the court on June 25, 2025; and it is further

ORDERED that insofar as the People's assertion that an enhanced sentence should be imposed is not the subject of a formal motion or cross-motion, the court shall treat this portion of the People's opposition papers as a sentencing memorandum. The defendant shall be entitled, but is not required, to submit a responsive sentencing memorandum at any time prior to sentencing; and it is further

ORDERED that the People's motion to reargue is denied as moot; and it is further

ORDERED that the parties are directed to personally appear before the court for further proceedings on June 10, 2026 at 1:00 p.m. as previously scheduled.

This constitutes the decision and order of the court.

Papers considered:

1. Indictment No. 70087-24

2. Transcript of Proceedings — June 25, 2025

3. Transcript of Proceedings — September 10, 2025

4. Notice of Motion to Reargue of Cheryl A. Botts, Esq. (undated), filed February 9, 2026

5. Affirmation of Cheryl A. Botts, Esq. in support of motion to re-argue, affirmed February 9, 2026

6. Notice of Motion to Reargue and Renew of Thomas B. Donaldson, Esq., dated March 3, 2026

7. Defendant's Memorandum in Support of Motion to Reargue and Renew, dated March 3, 2026

8. Affirmation of Nicholas H. Rohlfing, Esq. in opposition to defendant's motion to reargue and renew, affirmed March 20, 2026

FOOTNOTES

1.   Counts 1-4, 7-15 and 17-65 of the Indictment.

2.   Counts 5, 6 and 16 of the Indictment.

3.   These consequences include loss the defendant's professional licensure and the potential utility of the defendant's conviction in separate civil proceedings.

4.   Anonymized for purposes of this decision and order to protect the identity and preserve the privacy of the alleged victim.

Brian J. Herman, J.