Opinion ID: 1100664
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Bifurcation of the Evidentiary Hearing

Text: While we uphold the trial court's ultimate conclusion that trial counsel's performance was not deficient in this instance, thus obviating the need for any inquiry as to whether he suffered the requisite prejudice under Strickland, we also consider Henry's claim of error in the trial court's decision to limit any testimony or evidence presented at the rule 3.850 evidentiary hearing to Strickland's deficient performance prong only. Recently, we expressed concerns for such practice in Grosvenor v. State, 874 So.2d 1176 (Fla.2004). In that case, the defendant filed a motion for postconviction relief, alleging that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to advise her of a possible defense that presumably would have convinced her to proceed to trial instead of accepting a plea bargain. Id. at 1177. The trial court assumed, for the purposes of the evidentiary hearing, that trial counsel's performance was deficient, and thus only considered whether Grosvenor suffered prejudice under Strickland. Id. at 1178. We explicitly addressed the trial court's decision in that case to bifurcate the issues of performance and prejudice at the evidentiary hearing. Id. at 1182-83. Noting that the stated goal of the bifurcation in that instance was the conservation of time and resources, we concluded that Grosvenor demonstrated that such a process fails to achieve the desired efficiency. Id. at 1182. Furthermore, we observed: In many ineffective assistance of counsel claims . . . the deficient performance prong and the prejudice prong are related and can involve similar issues.... In this case, much of the evidence presented at the evidentiary hearing would have been relevant to counsel's alleged deficient performance as well as to prejudice. For example, Grosvenor's trial counsel testified that he considered the voluntary intoxication defense but that Sumter County juries do not view such a defense with favor. This testimony is relevant to whether Grosvenor's counsel performed deficiently in failing to inform her of the voluntary intoxication defense. Because the evidentiary hearing and the trial court's order specifically focused only on the prejudice prong, however, we cannot now consider this evidence to evaluate counsel's performance. For all these reasons, we are not convinced that bifurcating the hearing in this case achieved any efficiency. Moreover, when a court considers only the prejudice prong and concludes that no prejudice ensued, a later reversal which may not happen until more than a year latermay require another evidentiary hearing on the deficient performance prong, thereby unnecessarily prolonging the process. We suggest that courts consider such problems when determining whether to bifurcate an ineffective assistance of counsel claim. Id. at 1182-83. Although we have ultimately concluded that the trial court did not err in rejecting Henry's Strickland claims, we nevertheless repeat our concerns from Grosvenor here. We conclude that while Strickland claims can be properly dispensed with on either of the two prongs, limiting the scope of inquiry at the outset to only one prong seems to create more problems than it solves. First, as in both Grosvenor and the instant case, the two inquiries are often too interrelated to meaningfully separate them for the purposes of evidentiary development. For example, in the case currently before us, the postconviction experts who examined Henry were called in to testify at the evidentiary hearings, but were allowed to testify only as to the sufficiency of Dr. Block-Garfield's mental health evaluation insofar as it related to the adequacy of trial counsel's performance. They were prevented from relating their findings and evaluations regarding Henry's mental condition, which the trial court believed related only to prejudice. However, given the intertwined nature of such inquiries, the transcripts from the evidentiary hearings are full of instances when the parties would object to a line of questioning, forcing the trial court to stop and analyze the particular Strickland prong a potential answer could address and permit or prohibit the question accordingly. While the two inquiries under Strickland ultimately require separate and distinct analyses, limiting evidentiary development to only half of the full query seems to be an awkward approach for answering the broader question of ineffective assistance of counsel in postconviction motions. When adopting the amendments to Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.851, we clearly stated our intention to identify and eliminate those capital postconviction procedures that have historically created unreasonable delays in the process, while still maintaining quality and fairness. Amendments to Fla. Rules of Criminal Procedure 3.851, 3.852 3.993, 772 So.2d 488, 489 (Fla.2000). In fact, in adding the requirement for an evidentiary hearing on initial motions for postconviction relief, we specifically sought to reduce the unwarranted delay[s] that result when this Court is forced to overturn the trial court on postconviction motions. Id. As emphasized in Grosvenor, given our focus on adjudicating postconviction claims in a timely fashion, bifurcating a Strickland inquiry seems especially problematic, since a reversal by this Court on one prong of Strickland would require new proceedings on the same question of ineffective assistance of counsel as was addressed in the initial round of evidentiary hearings. However, this case makes it abundantly clear that the ultimate goal of efficiency in postconviction proceedings was not achieved in bifurcating the evidentiary hearing regarding ineffective assistance of trial counsel. Henry originally filed his postconviction motion in October of 1998, with the Huff hearing held in June of 1999; the two subsequent evidentiary hearings were held, both confined to the deficient performance prong only, in October of 2000 and in August of 2001. However, the trial court did not issue its order denying relief until January of 2003, almost seventeen months after the conclusion of the second evidentiary hearing. If this Court had in fact found trial counsel's performance to be deficient, it is clear that the final ruling on Henry's postconviction motion would have been prolonged indefinitely, given the time it would take both for the trial court to schedule another round of evidentiary hearings and for the parties to have time to prepare. Such a protracted timeline is not consistent with this Court's amendments to rule 3.851. While we find no reversible error here, we again caution trial judges to be very careful when considering such a procedure.