Opinion ID: 748614
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel(s)

Text: 41 Winsett presents two claims of ineffective assistance of counsel in his appeal. First, he alleges that his trial counsel should have contested the voluntariness of his statements to the police in addition to seeking suppression of the statements under Miranda/Edwards. Second, Winsett argues that his appellate counsel was unconstitutionally ineffective by failing to raise the fruit of the poisonous tree claim on direct appeal. Winsett's complaint about his trial counsel's performance appears for the first time in any of his post-conviction pleadings, and he submerged his reference to the ineffectiveness of his appellate counsel deep in his petition to the district court. 42 We cannot reach the merits of the first claim because Winsett did not present it in his petition to the district court. His petition concerned only the Miranda issue. For that matter, Winsett has not claimed to any court--state or federal--that his trial counsel provided ineffective assistance. As we made clear earlier, our precedent unambiguously requires Winsett to present this claim to the district court before bringing it to our attention. See supra at 274; see also Smith v. Fairman, 862 F.2d 630, 635 (7th Cir.1988), cert. denied, 490 U.S. 1008, 109 S.Ct. 1645, 104 L.Ed.2d 160 (1989). We must therefore reject Winsett's claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel. 43 The State argues that Winsett also failed to present his second ineffectiveness claim to the district court, but we have no trouble locating that claim in his single-count petition to the district court. Although his pro se petition is generally well-crafted, he lumped both of his claims of error into one count. He nevertheless did point out that his appellate counsel failed to argue the fruit claim on direct appeal, Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, No. 94 C 821, at 7, and he notes that [t]he Illinois Supreme Court ... erroneously determined that the circuit court properly denied the petition for post-conviction relief because Petitioner was not deprived of the effective assistance of counsel on direct appeal. Id. at 8. We cannot agree with the State that Winsett waived this claim simply because he did not cast it as a separate count in his petition. 10 This is especially true in light of our mantra that it is important to construe pro se filings liberally. Coulter v. Gramley, 93 F.3d 394, 397 (7th Cir.1996). 44 We employ familiar standards to resolve ineffective assistance of counsel claims. A petitioner must establish both that his counsel's performance fell below an objective standard of reasonableness and that, but for this deficient performance, the result of the proceeding would have been different. See Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 2068, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984). It is often beneficial for courts to consider the prejudice prong of Strickland's test before delving into murkier questions of whether certain acts or decisions constituted reasonable legal advocacy. In this case, Winsett must prove that the Illinois courts in 1987 would have found merit in the fruit of the poisonous tree claim that his appellate counsel neglected to raise. He cannot demonstrate the prejudice necessary to trigger a Sixth Amendment violation if his counsel merely failed to present an argument that would have failed anyway. 45 Our earlier survey of the relevant case law for Teague purposes should have foreshadowed our conclusion that Winsett cannot demonstrate that his fruit of the poisonous tree claim probably would have succeeded on direct appeal. The law at that time suggested strongly that, like other Miranda protections, the right under Edwards to have police cease a custodial interrogation when a defendant invokes his right to counsel is a prophylactic safeguard of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. The prevailing authority suggested, in other words, that Miranda and Edwards are extra-constitutional, not extra constitutional, protections. We cannot conclude that this fruit of the poisonous tree claim probably would have succeeded on direct appeal, especially in light of the rejection of this very same claim by the Supreme Court of Illinois in Winsett's petition for post-conviction relief. Thus, Winsett cannot demonstrate the necessary likelihood that raising the issue would have produced a different result on direct appeal.