Opinion ID: 3134662
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 16

Heading: Abandonment of Defense

Text: Citing People v. Hattery , 109 Ill. 2d 449 (1985), defendant maintains that trial counsel failed to subject the prosecution’s case to meaningful adversarial testing and, consequently, ineffective assistance of counsel can be presumed without application of the Strickland test. At the second stage of the death sentencing hearing, trial counsel made the following statements: “ The horror of the acts Darryl committed is beyond dispute . And I won’t take exception to them, I won’t cheapen this process by attempting to make excuses. By trying to say that they are anything less than they are. The fact that Darryl sits here before you, he takes responsibility. He takes responsibility for every single thing he’s done in his life. Regardless of what he said, regardless of the things he denied, regardless of how he may have manipulated, regardless of how he’s lied, and surely–he has lied–there are no excuses today. Today he sits here before you in judgment. He sits here in judgment for his acts, and possibly final judgment.