Opinion ID: 2390579
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Guilt-Phase Strategy

Text: Defendant claims that counsels' reliance on insubstantial defenses in lieu of other stronger theories and their failure to investigate and present other relevant exculpatory evidence also constituted ineffective assistance of counsel in the guilt phase. We disagree. We will not second-guess counsel's reasonable adoption of one of the countless ways to provide effective assistance in any given case. Strickland v. Washington, supra, 466 U.S. at 689, 104 S.Ct. at 2065, 80 L.Ed. 2d at 695. In a case like this one, in which the State's case rests nearly exclusively on a confession given by the defendant, counsel's decision to pursue a line of defense (reasonable doubt) that undercuts that confession's scientific and circumstantial reliability is not an unreasonable one. State v. Hightower, 120 N.J. 378, 412, 577 A. 2d 99 (1990). Counsel believed that only by attacking the confession could defendant prevail. Eschewing equally-problematic alternatives such as self-defense, passion/provocation manslaughter, an intoxication defense, or implicating Clark Miller is not constitutionally-deficient representation. Defendant's contention that counsel could not reasonably have rejected such alternatives because he did not adequately investigate the potential of each lacks persuasiveness. Although limited, his investigation here fell nowhere near the depths of deficiency found in State v. Savage, supra, 120 N.J. at 618-622, 577 A. 2d 455. [S]trategic choices made after thorough investigation of law and facts relevant to plausible options are virtually unchallengeable, and strategic choices made after less than complete investigation are reasonable precisely to the extent that reasonable professional judgments support the limitations on investigation. In other words, counsel has a duty to make reasonable investigation or to make a reasonable decision that makes particular investigations unnecessary. In any ineffectiveness case, a particular decision not to investigate must be directly assessed for reasonableness in all the circumstances, applying a heavy measure of deference to counsel's judgments. [ Strickland v. Washington, supra, 466 U.S. at 690-91, 104 S.Ct. at 2066, 80 L.Ed. 2d at 695.] Defendant has not shown counsel to have fallen below that mark of adequate acumen. Therefore, he has failed to satisfy the objective-unreasonableness prong of the Strickland test. Likewise, we reject defendant's claim that the cumulative effect of counsels' failures constituted a constitutional deprivation of effective assistance of counsel at the guilt phase even if no single instance itself does. Regardless of the choices that could have been made by trial counsel, those choices involved trial strategy in a difficult case, [in which] defense counsel attempted to highlight what few weaknesses there were in the State's case. State v. Hightower, supra, 120 N.J. at 412, 577 A. 2d 99. We will not base a decision that counsel was ineffective on such subjective standards.