Opinion ID: 1369544
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The love letters

Text: Storey claims that trial counsel was ineffective by failing to introduce, as impeachment evidence, a birthday card and two love letters that Kim wrote to Storey while he was in prison. Although the content of the letters was excluded during the second trial as hearsay, collateral, and sexually explicit, the fact that Kim sent the letters was discussed before the jury. Storey's counsel testified that the failure to offer these letters into evidence, at the third trial, was an oversight. Counsel also thought that the trial court probably would have excluded the letters from the third trial as had been done in the second trial. The motion court held: Trial counsel used her letters in the 1991 trial, with no success. It is not reasonable to believe the failure to read these letters was prejudicial and would have changed the outcome. The jury heard Kim's testimony when the transcript was read during the third trial. They knew that she had lied under oath before and continued to change her allegations. The jury knew that Kim wrote love letters to Storey while he was in prison and after the alleged abuse. That was a reasonable item for the jury to consider in evaluating Kim's testimony. Would she send him love letters if he truly treated her so badly? The probative content of the letters beyond this, however, was minimal. [1] The exclusion of the letters did not prejudice Storey because the letters simply showed how Kim expressed her sexual desire and love for Storey. The content of the letters would not have mitigated Storey's offense. Moreover, the value of the testimony would have been devalued by the sexual content included in the letters had they been admitted. It was not error for counsel not to try and introduce the letters. Storey has not shown prejudice because he has not shown a reasonable probability that had counsel tried to introduce the card and letters they would have been admitted, or even had they been admitted, the result of the proceeding would have been different. Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 391, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000) (internal citations omitted).