Opinion ID: 1133414
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Defense counsel's decision to call Dennis Morgan as a witness

Text: After the defense had subpoenaed Dennis Morgan, the prosecution's investigator, Detective Milkey, interviewed him, tape-recorded the interview, and made the recording available to the defense. Thus, before Morgan testified at trial, the defense knew that Morgan had told the prosecution that (1) defendant had previously been arrested for child molestation, and (2) defense counsel Bernstein had tried to bribe Morgan to commit perjury. Defense counsel called Morgan as a defense witness; Morgan repeated these accusations before the jury. According to defendant, no reasonably competent attorney acting as a diligent advocate would have subpoenaed Dennis Morgan, or having done so, would have made him a defense witness after learning that Morgan could be expected to make inflammatory accusations about the defense. We disagree. The prosecution's evidence put defendant alone with 18-month-old Amanda on the day that she was sexually molested and suffered fatal injuries inflicted by severe shaking and blunt force trauma to the head. Defendant countered this evidence by testimony that Dennis Morgan, an ex-convict and drug addict with an unconventional sexual history, came to MacNair's house on the day of the incident in search of heroin. According to defendant, Morgan had the opportunity to commit the crimes when he was in the house alone with baby Amanda for about half an hour while defendant was outside washing paintbrushes. Morgan, called to testify by the defense, admitted being a heroin addict, described himself as a bisexual who in prison had dressed as a woman, and admitted that in the course of his criminal history he had used some 19 different aliases. Thus, as the Attorney General observes here, by putting Morgan on the witness stand the defense was able to present the jury with a live, alternative suspect who had a complex and problematic sexual identity and who plausibly could have been present at MacNair's house to have raped, sodomized, and shaken to death baby Amanda while defendant was outside washing his paintbrushes. We therefore cannot say that `there simply could be no satisfactory explanation' ( People v. Kipp, supra, 18 Cal.4th at p. 367, 76 Cal.Rptr.2d 716, 956 P.2d 1169) for defense counsel's decision to call Morgan as a witness, even though they could expect him to accuse defendant, as he had in the interview taped by Detective Milkey, of having previously been arrested for, child molestation and to claim that defense attorney Bernstein had tried to bribe him to give false testimony. Moreover, Morgan's testimony, taken as a whole, was far more beneficial than harmful to the defense. The trial court blunted any potential negative impact of Morgan's statement that defendant had previously been arrested for child molestation, by instructing the jury that there has been no other arrests for any other molestation and to disregard anything you have heard to the contrary; it hasn't happened. And Morgan's claim of bribery by defense attorney Bernstein was inherently unbelievable. According to Morgan, Bernstein came to see him in the Los Angeles County jail, and when Morgan entered the attorney visitor room, Bernstein was already there and a $20 bill was on the table. Thus, the implication was that Bernstein put the money on the table as a bribe for Morgan. Yet Morgan also testified that other inmates and attorneys and a deputy sheriff were present in the room. Thus, to accept as true that Bernstein had offered Morgan a $20 bribe, the jury would have to conclude that he had done so in the full view of others, including jail personnel. This scenario would have seemed all the more unlikely in light of testimony by Deputy Sheriff Joseph Koch that under Los Angeles County jail regulations, attorneys are permitted to give jail inmates no more than $5 in cash and then only after obtaining approval from jail personnel. For the reasons given above, we cannot conclude that defense counsel's decision to call Morgan as a witness so undermined the proper functioning of the adversarial process that the trial cannot be relied on as having produced a just result. ( Strickland v. Washington, supra, 466 U.S. 668, 686, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674.) We also reject defendant's related contention that he was prejudiced by defense counsel's failure to make a timely request to play a redacted version of the tape recording of Detective Milkey's interview of Dennis Morgan. Defendant argues that the tape, if heard by the jury, would have impeached Morgan's trial testimony that he had entered the attorney visitor room to meet with defense attorney Bernstein and found a $20 bill on the table. In the taped interview Morgan said that Bernstein had offered the money under the table. Even assuming, as defendant contends, that these two versions of the $20 bill incident are contradictory, defendant suffered no prejudice from defense counsel's failure to make a timely request to play the tape for the jury. As we have explained, Morgan's trial testimony about defense attorney Bernstein's offering him a $20 bribe in the full view of jail personnel was inherently unbelievable.