Opinion ID: 4486983
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Failure to Challenge Jury Instruction4

Text: At trial, when the State began to ask the police officer if mug shots from arrests in other jurisdictions could have been included in the Passaic database, trial counsel moved for a mistrial because the line of questioning revealed information about Petitioner’s other arrests. The trial judge then instructed the jury: “So you don’t misunderstand the prosecutor’s question and think from it that maybe there was an arrest somewhere else, . . . there was no arrest that would have generated a photograph. An arrest made someplace out of the municipality of Passaic that would have generated a photograph that would be in that system.” App. 112–13. Petitioner urges that this jury instruction “compounded counsel’s ineffectiveness,” Appellant’s Br. 31, presumably because, if stripped from its context, the words “there was no arrest that would have generated a photograph” could imply that he was not in the Passaic database. But in context, it is clear that the questioning had been about arrests outside of Passaic, and the jury instruction spoke only to mug shots from other jurisdictions. We cannot perceive how counsel’s strategic decision to move for a mistrial 4 To the extent that Petitioner claims counsel’s failure to challenge the jury instruction is its own species of ineffectiveness, that is not the claim we certified and was not clearly raised in PCR proceedings in state court. In any event, we proceed because the claim “may be denied on the merits, notwithstanding the failure of the applicant to exhaust.” 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b)(2); see Dist. Attorney’s Office for the Third Judicial Dist. v. Osborne, 557 U.S. 52, 75 (2009) (Alito, J., concurring); Roman v. DiGuglielmo, 675 F.3d 204, 209 (3d Cir. 2012). 6 and then to accept the trial court’s favorable jury instruction was objectively unreasonable—especially given that we “apply the strong presumption of competence that Strickland mandates,” Pinholster, 563 U.S. at 196—much less prejudicial to Petitioner.