Opinion ID: 1133749
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Nice Guy mitigation

Text: In approving defense counsel's conduct as competent, the majority ignores the United States Supreme Court's Wiggins analysis and its strict emphasis on counsel's obligation to investigate and prepare, as well as this Court's own case law on the duty to investigate, and instead concludes that trial counsel's strategy in the instant case of presenting evidence to demonstrate that Hannon did not have the type of character to commit the murders was a tactical method used by trial counsel in an attempt to sway the jury's recommendation in favor of life over death. Majority op. at 1129. Essentially, the majority has written counsel a blank check to do anything counsel chooses without any judicial check on the effectiveness of counsel's strategy. Hence, the outcome in this case represents another in the long line of appellate cases recognizing the right to competent counsel by its breach. If anything, the conduct of counsel here was even more deficient than that of counsel in Wiggins. Even a cursory examination of defense counsel's testimony at the postconviction evidentiary hearing reflects his fundamental failure to understand defense counsel's obligation to investigate his client's background and prepare in advance for the penalty phase of a capital trial. Hannon's counsel asserted during the evidentiary hearing that the purpose of the penalty phase in this case [w]as to try to save [Hannon's] life so that we could find the killers.  (Emphasis supplied.) The following exchange during the direct examination of Hannon's trial counsel at Hannon's rule 3.851 evidentiary hearing further illustrates this fundamental failure: Q. [T]he jury didn't believe your alibi defense, did it? A. No, they did not. Q. And so when you came back the next day, you were pretending perhaps or going on the theory that you still needed to convince them that Mr. Hannon was innocent? A. I don't know about pretending, but you always have another chance to appeal to them in that phase, you know. They didn't believe it. Maybe they'll believe it now. He also testified: And we had decided that this was the position we were going to take. And then in the event that he was convicted, if we were to change that, if we were now to get up there and say I was there. I'm sorry. I didn't do it or any of that kind of stuffwhich I felt in those cases I prosecuted, I often felt those defense attorneys didn't handle that phase right. You know, they find somebody's convicted. Now they completely change their defense and get up there and take another tactic. We decided that wasn't what it was going to be because Mr. Hannon was adamant. I can't tell you how much he was adamant that he wasn't there. He didn't do this. He would never do this. The sparse evidence that Hannon's counsel presented during the penalty phase of the trial focused solely on Hannon's claim of innocence and that Hannon was not the type of person to commit murder. For example, the entire testimony of Toni Acker, the sister of Hannon's co-assailant, was as follows: Well, he was a good-time guy, carefree, liked to have fun. I can't believe that you have convicted him on this. He has even babysat my kid. He's even partied with [the victims], and I just don't believe that he couldhe would do anything nothing like that. I feel that it was drug related because of the way the way they were killed, and why would they go and kill their own friends? Hannon's mother testified that [h]e couldn't hurt anybody. Hannon's father testified that he believed Hannon was innocent and that he ought to be given a chance to prove that he is innocent. Even during Hannon's counsel's closing argument in the penalty phase, he argued only innocence. Concerning Hannon's position that he was innocent, Hannon's counsel stated to the jury, You don't agree with it, fine. But you have an opportunity to at least allow him to spend the rest of his life trying to clear his name. . . . Yes, we continue to maintain our not guilty, and we'll always continue to maintain not guilty. And what we're asking you to do is to give him a chance to clear his name and he's going to need a lot of time. If you put him on death row, he's got six years. That's not enough time. What the majority fails to recognize in approving this strategy is the extensive legal precedent from this Court and other courts, including Wiggins, recognizing counsel's fundamental duty to investigate and prepare, and holding that an attempt to retry the guilt phase is not relevant or appropriate in a penalty phase proceeding. What the prevailing law tells us, and tells defense lawyers, is that once a jury has determined that a defendant is guilty, then the issue of guilt or innocence is over, and such issue cannot be the appropriate focus of a penalty phase proceeding. In other words, counsel is charged with knowing the law and, under that law, he must move on in his obligation to investigate and provide an effective defense to the prosecution's case for the death penalty after the jury has rejected his innocence defense and convicted the defendant. As in Wiggins, and directly on point to the issue now before us, this Court held in Rose v. State, 675 So.2d 567 (Fla.1996), that counsel's failure to investigate while latching onto an accidental death strategy during the penalty phase constituted ineffective assistance of counsel. Id. at 572-73. This Court stated that the accidental death strategy appears to be closely akin to a claim of residual or lingering doubt, a claim which this Court has repeatedly held is not an appropriate matter to be raised in mitigation during the penalty phase proceedings of a capital case. Id. at 572 n. 5 (citing King v. State, 514 So.2d 354 (Fla.1987); Aldridge v. State, 503 So.2d 1257 (Fla.1987); Burr v. State, 466 So.2d 1051 (Fla.1985)); see also Trepal v. State, 846 So.2d 405, 434, 437 (Fla.2003) (finding that trial counsel was not ineffective for failing to present lingering doubt evidence even though the State stipulated and the trial court would have permitted its introduction); Darling v. State, 808 So.2d 145, 162 (Fla.2002) (This Court has followed the holding of the United States Supreme Court that there is no constitutional right to present `lingering doubt' evidence.); Way v. State, 760 So.2d 903, 916 (Fla.2000) ([T]his Court has previously rejected the argument that evidence that would serve only to create a lingering doubt of the defendant's guilt is admissible as a nonstatutory mitigating circumstance.). Similarly, the United States Supreme Court has explained: Finding a constitutional right to rely on a guilt-phase jury's residual doubts about innocence when the defense presents its mitigating case in the penalty phase is arguably inconsistent with the common practice of allowing penalty-only trials on remand of cases where a death sentencebut not the underlying convictionis struck down on appeal. Franklin v. Lynaugh, 487 U.S. 164, 173 n. 6, 108 S.Ct. 2320, 101 L.Ed.2d 155 (1988) (plurality opinion) (citing Scott v. State, 310 Md. 277, 529 A.2d 340, 352 (1987); Stringer v. State, 500 So.2d 928, 946 (Miss. 1986); Whalen v. State, 492 A.2d 552, 569 (Del.1985); Lockhart v. McCree, 476 U.S. 162, 205, 106 S.Ct. 1758, 90 L.Ed.2d 137 (1986) (Marshall, J., dissenting)). [25] As in Florida, the United States Supreme Court noted that its prior decisions . . . fail to recognize a constitutional right to have [residual] doubts considered as a mitigating factor. 487 U.S. at 174, 108 S.Ct. 2320 (plurality opinion). The Court has recently reaffirmed its adherence to these views. See Oregon v. Guzek, ___ U.S. ___, 126 S.Ct. 1226, 163 L.Ed.2d 1112 (2006). While the majority states that the Supreme Court has never resolved the issue of whether counsel is per se ineffective for pursuing a lingering doubt strategy in the penalty phase, Guzek is indeed instructive on the issue. In Guzek, the Court made the following observation regarding a defendant's desire to introduce new evidence at the penalty phase that he was not present at the scene of the crime: That evidence is inconsistent with [the defendant]'s prior conviction. It sheds no light on the manner in which he committed the crime for which he has been convicted. Nor is it evidence that [the defendant] contends was unavailable to him at the time of the original trial. And, to the extent it is evidence he introduced at that time, he is free to introduce it now, albeit in transcript form. We can find nothing in the Eighth or Fourteenth Amendments that provides a capital defendant a right to introduce new evidence of this kind at sentencing. Id. at 1230-31 (citation omitted). The Court differentiated cases in which it had held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments required that a defendant not be precluded from introducing any aspect of a defendant's character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death, id. at 1231 (quoting Lockett v. Ohio, 438 U.S. 586, 604, 98 S.Ct. 2954, 57 L.Ed.2d 973 (1978) (plurality opinion)), by stating that the evidence in those prior cases was traditional sentence-related evidence, evidence that tended to show how, not whether, the defendant committed the crime. Nor was the evidence directly inconsistent with the jury's finding of guilt. Id. at 1231. The Court also noted, [T]his Court's previous cases had not interpreted the Eighth Amendment as providing a capital defendant the right to introduce at sentencing evidence designed to cast `residual doubt' on his guilt of the basic crime of conviction. The Franklin [ v. Lynaugh, 487 U.S. 164, 108 S.Ct. 2320, 101 L.Ed.2d 155 (1988),] plurality said it was `quite doubtful' that any such right existed. Id. at 1231-32. Finally, the Court stated that sentencing traditionally concerns how, not whether, a defendant committed the crime, and that the parties previously litigated the issue to which the evidence is relevantwhether the defendant committed the basic crime. The evidence thereby attacks a previously determined matter in a proceeding at which, in principle, that matter is not at issue. The law typically discourages collateral attacks of this kind. Id. at 1232 (citing Allen v. McCurry, 449 U.S. 90, 94, 101 S.Ct. 411, 66 L.Ed.2d 308 (1980)). Based on the Court's reasoning in Guzek, it is logical to infer that counsel would be deemed per se ineffective for relying solely on evidence concerning whether the defendant had the character to commit the crime during the penalty phase, as Hannon's counsel did in this case. In ignoring this case law and approving of counsel's performance here, the majority appears to adopt a three-step approach. First, it ignores the mandate for defense counsel's duty to investigate set out in cases like Wiggins and Rose; second, it transforms counsel's continuing assertion of innocence defense (explicitly disapproved of in Wiggins and Rose ), into a reasonable doubt strategy; and, third, it approves of this freshly coined strategy as reasonable and effective even in the face of this Court's consistent holdings to the contrary. In fact, the record reflects that counsel did not actually assert lingering doubt as that term is commonly understood. To say he did gives him way too much credit. Lingering doubt usually refers to the assertion of certain weaknesses in the State's case for guilt. Defense counsel did not do that. Rather, as noted above, he simply continued his claim, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that his client was innocent and should receive a life sentence so he could continue to attempt to prove his innocence. This is, however, precisely the kind of conduct that this Court and the United States Supreme Court, in cases like Rose and Wiggins, have found to constitute ineffectiveness under Strickland. Any attempt by the majority to classify this strategy differently involves superficial semantics. See majority op. at 1127 n. 11 (We reiterate that counsel's strategy was to demonstrate to the jury that Hannon in no way possessed the type of character to commit the crimes.). [26] Contrary to this overwhelming precedent, some of which the majority sets out in its opinion, and as exemplified by the holdings in Wiggins and Rose, the majority holds that [i]t is certainly logical that a jury of laypersons is less likely to recommend death if they have some lingering concerns about guilt than if there is absolute certainty on the issue of guilt. Majority op. at 1129-30. While this writer may agree with this statement in the abstract, it ignores and says nothing about what actually happened in this case or the state of our law on the issue and its relationship to counsel and his obligation to thoroughly investigate and present mitigation during the penalty phase of a capital case. In essence, the majority has transformed counsel's continuing innocence strategy into a lingering doubt strategy and then approved conduct by counsel that this Court and the United States Supreme Court have expressly forbidden. [27] In addition to the wealth of legal precedent stating that lingering doubt evidence is not appropriate as mitigation during the penalty phase of a capital trial, it is apparent that it does not make sense in practice to rely blindly on a my guy is too nice to have done it theory after a jury has unanimously determined beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did do it. Maintaining such a head-in-the-sand posture after the jury has rejected it is akin to asking jury members to reverse themselves on the finding of guilt, after they have obviously anguished over such an important decision. In other words, the penalty phase of a capital trial is not a second trial on guilt, but is rather a proceeding to determine the appropriate punishment, death or life in prison without parole, for someone who has already been adjudicated guilty. And, as the United States Supreme Court and this Court have repeatedly emphasized, the penalty phase is the time for counsel to investigate and prepare an effective defense of the State's case for the death penalty, by both rebutting the State's claims of aggravation and by putting on an effective claim of mitigation. That is what the trial judge explicitly tells the jury it must focus on by the court's instructions, and that is what defense counsel must focus on if it expects the jury to respond and to follow the trial judge's instructions.