Opinion ID: 1800657
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Impeaching Perez

Text: Garcia alleges that his trial counsel was ineffective in failing to impeach Perez with statements attributed to her in a police report from August 1983, seven months after the murders. The report states that Perez, while working in the fields, heard [Garcia] say something like `Night before last I killed some guys and old ladies.' At trial, however, and again in her postconviction deposition, Perez recalled the confession differently. She testified that Garcia spoke of killing women only  not men. She denied that Garcia's codefendant participated in the conversation, as the police report suggested. She also disputed the report's assertion that she refused to give the police a formal statement. She testified that the report, which wrongly referred to her by her former husband's last name, was all lies. The circuit court, while not going that far, agreed that the report was confusing and inaccurate, and dismissed it as having little or no value for impeachment purposes. We reach the same conclusion as the circuit court. The police report contains demonstrable inaccuracies. For example, it mistakenly refers to Perez as Mrs. Feliciano  the name of another main witness  only one sentence before recounting what Perez heard in the fields. The same carelessness could have pervaded other aspects of the report. Moreover, while Garcia would prefer to emphasize the differences between the report and Perez's trial testimony, an effective attorney would have been equally mindful of their similarities. The report states that Perez heard Garcia confess to having stabbed to death a woman, possibly old, and that the woman did not even defend herself. Drawing the jury's attention to this earlier account might have been more harmful than helpful to the defense. Garcia, who failed to question trial counsel about this issue at the evidentiary hearing, clearly has not met his burden of proving deficiency. Additionally, we find no prejudice. More powerful challenges to Perez's testimony  for instance, that she delayed in telling the authorities because she thought Garcia was joking, and that payroll records indicated that Garcia stopped working with Perez before the murders  were presented to the jury, which nonetheless returned a guilty verdict. Our confidence in the outcome is not undermined.