Opinion ID: 782567
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Failure to Investigate the Value of the Earrings

Text: 183 At trial, the prosecution presented evidence that a pair of gold-ball earrings had been seized from a storage locker rented by Alcala. Marianne Frazier, Samsoe's mother, testified that the earrings were similar to a pair of cheap $3 earrings that she owned and that Samsoe sometimes wore, earrings that she had not seen since Samsoe's disappearance. 184 Alcala urges that his trial counsel was constitutionally ineffective in failing to call an expert gemologist to demonstrate that the earrings found in the storage locker were not cheap $3 earrings, such as those that Samsoe's mother testified that she had owned, but instead were mid-priced custom jewelry with a higher gold content. Alcala presented the testimony of a gemologist at the evidentiary hearing to establish the gold content and value of the earrings. This testimony was inconsistent with Frazier's testimony, substantially undercutting the assertion that the earrings found in the storage locker were taken from Samsoe. Although the district court recognized the potential impact of an expert gemologist's testimony in neutraliz[ing] the damaging inferences the jury might otherwise draw from the similarity between the earrings in Alcala's storage locker and Ms. Frazier's lost earrings, the district court found no deficiency because trial counsel had no way of knowing that the earrings were inconsistent with Frazier's description. 185 We agree with the district court's conclusion that this alleged deficiency was properly excluded from the cumulative error analysis. Alcala's trial counsel reasonably could have expected that if the earrings were more valuable than Frazier suggested, Alcala, as the owner of the earrings, would have informed him of this fact. See Strickland, 466 U.S. at 691, 104 S.Ct. 2052 (The reasonableness of counsel's actions may be determined ... by the defendant's own statements or actions. Counsel's actions are usually based, quite properly, ... on information supplied by the defendant.). There is no indication in the record that Alcala did so, or that competent counsel would have realized that the earrings were more valuable than the earrings described by Frazier. 13 Trial counsel's performance was not deficient, and the prejudice from the failure to investigate the value of the earrings cannot be included in our cumulative error analysis.