Opinion ID: 1845267
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: has king established prejudice?

Text: Assuming arguendo that there was inadequate representation, King has utterly failed to make any showing of prejudice, as is required by the second prong of the Strickland test. The circuit court, in denying King's petition found as follows: In any event the Court does not feel that alternative decisions would have had any effect on the outcome of this case. A young, strong man who admitted he was a burglar in the elderly woman's house, could have taken anything he wanted and left without doing physical harm to anyone. Instead he committed a brutal murder on the victim who was almost blind and nearly deaf. There is no reasonable probability that any omitted evidence or failure to make certain objections would have changed the jury conclusion that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating circumstances. Lelia Patterson was eighty-four years old. She suffered a severe blow to the head. She was also manually strangled and drowned. When the autopsy was performed, bloody froth was still flowing freely from her mouth and nose. King v. State, 421 So.2d 1009, 1016 (Miss. 1982). The pathologist who testified at trial was unable to say in what sequence the blow, the strangulation and the drowning occurred, but stated that it was possible that the order of events was such that she was conscious as she was being drowned. King committed the murder in the course of a burglary. In reweighing this evidence, we can find no reasonable probability that the jury at the sentencing phase, even with benefit of character witnesses and evidence of arguably low intelligence, would have concluded that the balance of aggravating and mitigating circumstances did not warrant death, Evans v. State, 485 So.2d 276, 282 (Miss.), cert. denied, ___ U.S. ___, 106 S.Ct. 2908, 90 L.Ed.2d 994 (1986) (quoting Mitchell v. Kemp, 762 F.2d 886, 889 (11th Cir.1985). The circuit court's denial of King's petition for writ of error coram nobis is affirmed. AFFIRMED. ROY NOBLE LEE and HAWKINS, P.JJ., DAN M. LEE, PRATHER, SULLIVAN, ANDERSON and GRIFFIN, JJ., concur. ROBERTSON, J., specially concurs.