A man who pled guilty to two indictments urged the New Jersey Supreme Court to let him withdraw his global guilty plea Tuesday, saying that an appellate win in one of the cases has strengthened his negotiating position.

The appeal asks whether a defendant can withdraw from a global plea agreement that covers multiple indictments if he wins an appeal that affects one of them. During oral arguments before the high court, assistant deputy public defender Alison Gifford said her client, Jamar Myers, should be entitled to do so under basic principles of contract law.

"When a defendant enters a global plea, or any plea, to multiple charges, that's one plea agreement," she said. "And plea agreements are made up of a lot of interconnected promises, and if one of those promises goes away, the plea comes undone. It's one plea agreement."

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey submitted amicus briefs backing Myers and appeared at Tuesday's oral arguments to argue in support of his case.

The New Jersey Attorney General, meanwhile, similarly backed prosecutors who argued that allowing Myers to withdraw his plea is not supported by law and would be impractical.

In November 2016, Myers pled guilty to two indictments stemming from separate incidents. The first related to a felony murder at a pharmacy, while the second related to an armed robbery at a 7-Eleven convenience store.

Myers was prepared to go to trial on the felony murder charge from the pharmacy case, but prosecutors made a bundled offer: If he pled guilty to both, they would request a 30-year sentence for the felony murder and a 12-year concurrent sentence for the armed robbery. If not, they would seek an extended term on the armed robbery case, making him eligible for life in prison, and consecutive sentences for all of the cases.

Myers' defense counsel explained to him that prosecutors made a good offer for a "global deal" that put him in a better position than he would have been even if he prevailed at trial on the felony murder charge, according to Myers' petition to the state's high court.

Myers signed the plea agreement, which preserved his right to appeal a pretrial evidentiary ruling that admitted key evidence from a warrantless search against him in the 7-Eleven robbery case. He appealed that ruling and won, with the New Jersey Supreme Court vacating his armed robbery conviction in 2022.

That appellate victory opened the door for Myers to withdraw from the plea agreement, according to those arguing for Myers' position.

Myers then sought to withdraw his guilty plea in the felony murder case but was denied at the trial and appellate court levels. He filed a petition in the instant appeal in May.

But prosecutors said in briefing last year that the appellate win should not open the door for a defendant to withdraw his plea in a separate case.

"There is no law, nor case law, that allows the conditional plea rule to apply to a defendant's multiple unrelated indictments," prosecutors told the court in briefing. "This is a matter of common sense and logic. Rather, our courts have already determined that the conditional plea rule does not apply to multiple unrelated indictments, unless there was explicit intention from both the state and defendant at the time of the pleas."

Erin Rein of the Office of the Mercer County Prosecutor told justices that a ruling in favor of Myers could have "absurd" consequences. She posed a hypothetical: What if a defendant entered a global plea to a first-degree homicide and a fourth-degree shoplifting in two totally unrelated cases?

"The rule that the defendant is asking you adopt, ultimately, if there were a suppression motion overturned on the fourth-degree shoplifting, the defendant is asking you to allow all defendants to then withdraw their plea on a first-degree homicide," she said.

Rein added that such a decision would also present some practical hurdles for prosecutors. In the decade since Myers entered his plea, evidence has degraded and witness availability has become less certain.

"Ultimately, what's clear is that the defendant in this case is not saying that he did not commit a first-degree homicide," she said. "He's not saying he didn't murder an innocent man in a pharmacy. And what the defendant is proposing here is that this court make a ruling that would make the victim-survivors collateral damage in a case where he's already received an extremely beneficial plea bargain."

Remi Spencer, on behalf of the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey, told the court that if she had represented Myers years ago, she could not think of anything she would have done differently to preserve his right to withdraw from the global plea agreement.

A ruling that Myers cannot escape the global settlement could also create problems, she said.

"Without conditional pleas, defendants must go to trial solely to preserve appellate rights, consuming the resources of the court, the state and the defense," Spencer said.

The government was represented by Erin Rein of the Office of the Mercer County Prosecutor.

Myers was represented by Alison Gifford of the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender.

The ACLU was represented by its own Ezra Rosenberg.

The Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey was represented by Remi Spencer of Pashman Stein Walder Hayden PC.

The case is State of New Jersey v. Jamar Myers, case number 090743, in the Supreme Court of the State of New Jersey.

--Editing by Dave Trumbore.