MADISON COUNTY, Ala. (WHNT) — After pleading guilty to felony murder in January in connection to the death of an infant, a Meridianville man wants to withdraw that plea, court records show.

41-year-old Cornell Landry was indicted for murder in April 2022, accused of murdering Karrington Montague after he allegedly abused her.

Court records show Landry is accused of abusing the baby – and during that abuse caused her death by blunt force trauma.

He was arrested on July 9, 2020, three months after Montague’s death, according to online court records. He was taken to the Madison County Jail and released a few hours later on a $75,000 bond.

On Feb. 22, 2023, Landry was booked back into the Madison County Jail following his sentencing hearing – which is where court documents now say things did not go as he expected.

Landry says he pled guilty “based on erroneous advice from his trial counsel,” saying the State offered him a 10-year sentence with a two-year split. The document goes on to say that he “was made aware that if he did not accept the plea, he would have been facing life without the possibility of parole.”

He added that his defense attorney, Robert Tuten, reassured him the sentencing hearing was a formality, and that the judge would sentence him to the 10 years split as they’d talked about.

However, Landry was sentenced to 20 years in prison in the Alabama Department of Corrections.

Because he says he “relied on the erroneous advice of counsel and believed that by entering a blind plea he would be helping himself and receive a shorter sentence,” Landry claims in court documents that he was not aware of what he was doing by entering his plea.

Landry added that he “did not understand that such a long sentence was a possibility, especially considering that he was evaluated and found to be low risk,” saying his guilty plea was “not intelligent or voluntary.”

While the motion to withdraw his guilty plea was filed on March 16, 2023, no hearings were scheduled at the time this article was written.