Opinion ID: 2828567
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Crime-Scene Reconstruction Expert

Text: Defendant contends that his trial attorneys were ineffective by failing to counter the government’s crime-scene reconstruction expert, Iris Dalley. He says they could have called or at least consulted with Edward Hueske, a ballistics and crime-scene reconstruction expert who had been retained in the state-court proceedings and for whom the district court had authorized funding. Instead, they decided to rely solely on crossexamining Dalley. According to Defendant, that was an ineffective strategy: His trial attorneys should have objected to Dalley’s testimony in the first place; called Hueske as a witness; and prepared adequately for Dalley’s testimony by consulting with Hueske and reviewing all Dalley’s state-court transcripts.1 Defendant states that Dalley’s testimony was damaging for two reasons. First, it placed him standing outside his residence when shooting, which countered his defense that he shot from a prone position inside his residence where he could not see any emergency lights on the vehicles behind the lead Bronco and thus did not know that the intruders were law-enforcement officers. Second, Dalley’s testimony established that Eales was shot after he exited the Bronco, which, he 1 The government argues that the first and third of these arguments are outside the bounds of the COA, which provides for argument only on “[w]hether trial counsel provided ineffective assistance in the guilt phase by failing to present a crime-scene expert.” Case Mgmt. Order at 1, Barrett, No. 12-7086. Defendant responds that his request for a COA on this issue encompassed all the challenges he now raises on appeal. We need not decide whether Defendant’s claims exceed the scope of the COA because they fail regardless. 11 says, again tended to negate Defendant’s defense that he was unaware he was firing on law-enforcement officers. Central to all of Defendant’s complaints is the contention that his trial attorneys could not have made an informed strategic choice to forgo Hueske and rely solely on cross-examination of Dalley because they never consulted with Hueske about Dalley’s testimony, did not have transcripts of her testimony from the second state trial, and spent little time preparing for her cross-examination. The government does not appear to contest that Defendant’s trial attorneys consulted no expert and concedes that they were without the second-trial transcripts. Nevertheless, the government argues that an informed strategic choice was made. It points to an affidavit executed during the § 2255 proceedings by one of Defendant’s trial attorneys, Roger Hilfiger, which states: The State Court transcripts caused me to be aware that during the pendency of Mr. Barrett’s Sequoyah County prosecution, the presiding judge had considered striking Iris Dalley’s testimony. I felt that during the federal trial, the defense could rely on the same plan for cross-examination that Mr. Barrett’s lawyers had successfully employed in the county case. I did not think that employing a defense expert on crime scene reconstruction would make a difference in our ability to confront Ms. Dalley’s testimony. Aplee. Br. at 26 (internal quotation marks omitted). And it contends that Dalley’s testimony from the first state trial included a critical concession that Defendant’s trial attorneys knew would negate her impact: a concession that Defendant may have fired every shot from inside his residence. As was true for the decision to call Choney, we cannot condemn the decision to rely solely on cross-examination of Dalley when that strategy apparently worked well in 12 the state trials. According to one of Defendant’s previous lawyers, “[H]er testimony was, quite frankly, I think kind of embarrassing for the Government down there, because she contradicted her written reports with her testimony in court, and her creation of [a] computer model had numerous flaws that were pointed out to the jurors in both trials.” R., Vol. 3 at 218. Although consultation with an expert to prepare for cross-examination, or calling a rebuttal expert in addition to cross-examination, may have been a better choice, we cannot say that failure to do so was deficient performance. “[S]trategic choices made after less than complete investigation are reasonable precisely to the extent that reasonable professional judgments support the limitations on investigation.” Strickland, 466 U.S. at 690–91. When a strategy produced such favorable results at a prior trial on essentially the same charges, a reasonably competent attorney could decide that it would be foolhardy to experiment with a different approach absent a good reason to believe that some new factor would alter the equation. Defendant also contends that his trial attorneys were ineffective for failing to consult with Hueske on whether the bullet fragments found in Eales’s body came from Defendant’s rifle. A government expert testified that they matched Defendant’s weapon. But Defendant has not shown that Hueske would have testified to the contrary. All he proffers is a letter from Hueske stating that he was “unable to assess the validity” of the government’s bullet-fragment analysis without access to that analysis and the evidence. R., Vol. 1a pt. 1 at 1221. This is not enough. To establish the prejudice prong of 13 Strickland, Defendant was required to go a step farther, showing that Hueske would have contradicted the government’s expert if he had obtained access to the fragments.