Memorandum decisions of this Court do not create legal precedent.
ALLARD, Judge.
In 2000, William G. Yatchmenoff was convicted of six counts of first-degree sexual abuse of a minor.
Yatchmenoff appealed his convictions to this Court. We affirmed Yatchmenoff's convictions in an unpublished decision.
A year after Yatchmenoff's appeal was final, the United States Supreme Court decided Blakely v. Washington.
Following the Blakely decision, Yatchmenoff filed a motion under Alaska Criminal Rule 35(a), asserting that his sentence was illegal because the aggravators in his case had been found by the judge rather than a jury. The superior court denied the motion, concluding that Blakely did not apply retroactively to defendants whose appeals were final before Blakely was issued. Yatchmenoff appealed this ruling, and his appeal was stayed (along with the appeals of other criminal defendants similarly situated) until the Alaska Supreme Court decided State v. Smart.
After the Alaska Supreme Court decided Smart, this Court issued an order (1) lifting the stay in all of the Blakely appeals, including Yatchmenoff's, and (2) directing the defendants in all of those cases to tell this Court whether they conceded that their appeal was resolved by the supreme court's decision in Smart. In response, Yatchmenoff's appointed counsel notified this Court that Yatchmenoff was abandoning his claim on appeal. The Clerk's Office thereupon closed Yatchmenoff's case.
More than three years later, Yatchmenoff filed a pro se motion to correct an illegal sentence, arguing that the pre-2005 presumptive sentencing scheme was unconstitutional. The State argued that Yatchmenoff was essentially seeking to relitigate the issue of whether Blakely was retroactive — an issue that had already been definitively resolved in Smart. The superior court agreed and denied the motion.
Yatchmenoff then filed this appeal, filing both a pro se brief and a brief through appointed counsel. On appeal, Yatchmenoff's counsel acknowledges that Yatchmenoff is essentially asking this Court to overrule the Alaska Supreme Court's decision in Smart. Counsel likewise acknowledges that this Court lacks the authority to do so.
In response, the State argues that Smart was correctly decided and should not be overruled. The State also argues that Yatchmenoff is procedurally barred from raising his Blakely claim because his motion is a successive petition for post-conviction relief.
We conclude we do not need to decide if this is a successive petition because Yatchmenoff's claim is also procedurally barred under AS 12.72.020(a)(5), which prohibits defendants from seeking post-conviction relief based on a claim that was "decided on its merits or on procedural grounds in any previous proceeding." Indeed, Yatchmenoff's claim is similarly barred under the doctrine of res judicata, which prohibits relitigation of already litigated claims and also bars parties from raising new claims or defenses that could have been raised in the prior litigation.
Accordingly, we AFFIRM the judgment of the superior court.