Opinion ID: 2084499
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Failure to Call Andrew Morris as a Witness

Text: Andrew Morris, a paramedic with the District of Columbia Fire Department, lived in an apartment on Bellevue Street, a short distance from the scene of the crime. At Walls' first trial in March 1995, Morris testified that when he arrived home on August 9, 1992, he saw two men run out of the alley where Jesse Moore's body would soon be found, get into a blue Pontiac, and drive away. [9] He did not hear any shots or see anything in the men's hands. He described the two men as being in their mid-to upper twenties and said he recognized one of them as someone who was considered an area thief. After the men drove away, two security guards asked Morris if he had seen anything. When he answered affirmatively, they took him to the scene of the murder. Morris testified that the two men who were picked up by the police were the same two that he had seen running away after the shooting. Walls' first trial ended in a hung jury. Morris was not called as a witness in the third trial, [10] which resulted in a conviction. Walls now claims that his attorney's decision not to call Morris to testify at his third trial amounted to ineffective assistance. [11] Several weeks after the third trial ended, but before sentencing, the court allowed Walls' retained counsel to withdraw from the case and appointed a new attorney for sentencing. That attorney, however, advised the court in a motion that Walls was dissatisfied with his approach to this matter, with his advice and explanations, and wants counsel to withdraw immediately and the court to appoint another attorney to represent him. The court granted this motion and appointed a third attorney for sentencing. A few weeks later  still before sentencing, which had been postponed  that third attorney [12] filed on Walls' behalf a purported motion to vacate sentence under D.C.Code § 23-110 (1996), even though there was as yet no sentence to vacate. The government opposed the motion as premature, citing the statutory language itself, [13] and argued that in any event the motion was without merit. When the case came on for sentencing, the court  quite correctly  agreed with the government that the motion was premature and therefore could not be considered under section 23-110. It therefore deferred ruling on the motion until after it had actually imposed sentence because if I simply [deny it as premature] now, inevitably I'll have to deal with it later. It then imposed consecutive sentences of imprisonment totaling forty-five years to life. After doing so, the court denied Walls' section 23-110 motion (which by then was properly before the court) without an evidentiary hearing, for the reasons well stated by [the] government ... in its written opposition to the motion, expressly accepting the government's argument  which the government essentially repeats in this court  that counsel's decision not to call Morris as a witness in the third trial was a wise tactical decision. [14] In order to prevail on his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, Walls must show that his attorney's representation fell below an objective standard of reasonableness, Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984), and that there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different. Id. at 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Our scrutiny of counsel's performance [is] highly deferential, and we indulge a strong presumption that counsel's conduct falls within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance. Id. at 689, 104 S.Ct. 2052. The benchmark for judging any claim of ineffectiveness must be whether counsel's conduct so undermined the proper functioning of the adversarial process that the trial cannot be relied on as having produced a just result. Id. at 686, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Walls contends that Morris clearly had relevant information about the events surrounding the shooting which contradicted the accounts given by Bryan and Cherry. The only contradiction Walls actually identifies, however, is between Morris' testimony that the two men escaped in a blue car, which matched the report that Cherry first gave to the police on the night of the murder, and Cherry's subsequent disavowal of that story at trial. Walls claims that Morris' testimony would have undermined the credibility of Cherry's trial testimony by corroborating Cherry's prior statements. Given that Morris' description of the two men he saw running from the area matched, in some respects, the description Cherry initially gave to the police, Morris' testimony could have raised some doubt as to which of Cherry's stories to believe. Thus it is theoretically possible that a jury could have found that the two men seen by Morris and described by Cherry were actually the real shooters [15] and that Cherry and Bryan, for some unexplained reason, had decided to concoct a story falsely implicating Walls in the murder. The government argues that the decision not to call Morris in Walls' third trial was a reasonable tactical decision because, under the standard for determining the admissibility of evidence of a third-party perpetrator, see Winfield v. United States, 676 A.2d 1, 2-4 (D.C.1996) (en banc), Morris' testimony was only marginally relevant and might not even have been admissible. Walls responds that Winfield and related cases are inapplicable here because the purpose of Morris' testimony was not to raise the possibility that the two men seen running from the alley were involved in the shooting, but merely to attack the credibility of Bryan and Cherry. Because Walls expressly disclaims any intention to use Morris' testimony as support for a third-party perpetrator defense, we do not analyze his attorney's decision under Winfield. Assessing Morris' testimony solely with respect to its potential effect on the credibility of Bryan and Cherry, we conclude that it would have been of such minimal benefit to Walls' case that his attorney's tactical decision to forego the use of it was not unreasonable. See ( Willie) Smith v. United States, 454 A.2d 822, 825 (D.C.1983) (the decision to call witnesses is a judgment `left almost exclusively to counsel') (citation omitted). Since Walls has not shown that the outcome of the trial would have been different if Morris had testified, Strickland, 466 U.S. at 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052, we reject his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel.