The court in United States v. Mancinas-Flores, case no. 08-10094 (9th Cir. Dec. 2, 2009) offers a good primer in the law of  guilty pleas, but is notable from an appellate perspective for the reason the divided court reverses the conviction after jury trial: the trial court’s failure to exercise available discretion when it rejected the defendant’s “Alford plea” of guilty (i.e., a plea of guilty while maintaining innocence):

The court’s failure to state a reason for rejecting the plea is problematic. As explained in the discussion above, a court may reject a guilty plea for a number of different reasons, and usually we would review its decision to reject the plea for one of those reasons for abuse of discretion. However, without knowing the basis for the decision to reject the plea in the first place, we cannot review for abuse of discretion. Abuse-of-discretion review is not meaningful where a court fails to give reasons for its decision and its reasons are not apparent from the record. [Citations.]

Many times, an appellate court can affirm under the abuse of discretion standard if the record indicates adequate support for he judgment. Here, however, the court explains why it cannot do so:

This is not a case in which we may affirm so long as any ground for affirming appears in the record. So although it is possible that the district court properly exercised its discretion, such possibility does not enable us to affirm. When a district court makes a discretionary decision, we will affirm so long as the decision is within the range of permissible decisions that the court could have made given the law and the facts confronting it. But before we can be sure that the district court’s choice falls within that range, we need to be certain that the district court applied the proper law, considered all the relevant factors, and actually exercised its discretion. See United States v. Cunningham, 429 F.3d 673, 679 (7th Cir. 2005) (“[W]henever a district judge is required to make a discretionary ruling that is subject to appellate review, we have to satisfy ourselves, before we can conclude that the judge did not abuse his discretion, that he exercised his discretion, that is, that he considered the factors relevant to that exercise.”). In short, when we review for abuse of discretion, we necessarily review the district court’s decision-making process, not simply whether the decision resulted in a permissible outcome. [Footnote omitted.]

This is where the dissenting justice parts ways with the majority. The dissenting judge insists that the defendant did not contend his plea was an Alford plea until he appealed, and even if considered an Alford plea, the trial court was within its discretion to refuse, and that alone is reason to affirm:

Mancinas-Flores argues, and the majority holds, that the district court’s failure to explain its reasons means that it did not actually exercise its discretion. I disagree given the record in this case. Mancinas-Flores neither objected nor sought an explanation; no doubt it was as obvious to him then, as it is to me now, that the district court rejected his guilty plea because he said he really wasn’t guilty. The court could do this whether his plea is characterized as it was at the time — an ordinary, “straight-up” guilty plea — or as it is now, a putative Alford plea. See, e.g., O’Brien, 601 F.2d at 1070 (declining to find abuse of discretion in rejecting guilty plea when a defendant refused to admit guilt); Buonocore, 416 F.3d at 1129-31 (upholding district court’s discretion to adopt a general policy against Alford or nolo pleas). If a district court may reject an Alford plea as a matter of unarticulated preference, it follows that the court may do so without articulated reason. [Footnotes omitted.]

Notably, the Buonocore decision is from the Tenth Circuit. If dissenting Judge Rymer is correct that the majority is in conflict with Buonocore, the circuit split opens the potential for Supreme Court review.