Opinion ID: 6927137
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Telephone Records

Text: Finally, the magistrate judge determined McAleese’s trial counsel was deficient in failing to investigate telephone company records to determine whether they showed any long distance phone calls to Natalie’s office during the critical time period from 2:30 to 3:00 p.m. on the day of the murder, December 1,1982. If they did not, McAleese contends, they would, when coupled with Natalie’s testimony about a 3:00 p.m. phone call, strongly support his alibi defense. In December 1982, the telephone company retained records reflecting the origin of long distance, but not local, phone calls for thirty to sixty days. There is evidence that these records could have been subpoenaed within that period to determine whether Natalie received any long distance calls during the relevant time. Specifically, McAleese consulted trial counsel within that period and says he informed him of his phone calls to Natalie. The absence of any long distance calls about the time of the murder would have permitted the jury to infer that McAleese was not calling Natalie from Philadelphia, so he was not in Philadelphia at the time of the murder and thus could not have committed the crime. The right to effective assistance of counsel encompasses counsel’s duty to investigate. See United States v. Gray, 878 F.2d 702, 711 (3d Cir.1989) (noting general agreement among courts of appeals that failure to conduct any pretrial investigation constitutes clear instance of ineffectiveness) (citations omitted). In this context, “ ‘strategic 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.’ ” Id. at 710 (quoting Strickland, 466 U.S. at 690-91, 104 S.Ct. at 2066). McAleese’s trial counsel stated at the post-trial hearing that he did not know that the telephone company could identify the origin of non-collect, long distance calls from its records of activity at the receiving phone. McAleese testified that he had told counsel about the ability of the phone company to retrieve such records and had asked him to obtain them. Faced with this conflicting evidence, the trial court decided that trial counsel had thoroughly investigated and considered all the areas about which McAleese complained post-verdict. Implicit in this conclusion is a finding that trial counsel’s testimony was credible. This finding is presumptively correct and should not be disturbed by a federal court on habeas review if it is fairly supported by the record. See Reese, 946 F.2d at 254 (“ ‘underlying facts about counsel’s performance are entitled to the presumption of correctness under 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), if fairly supported by the record’”) (quoting Ford v. Armontrout, 916 F.2d 457, 460 (8th Cir.1990), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 111 S.Ct. 1594, 113 L.Ed.2d 657 (1991)); accord Hakeem, 990 F.2d at 767-68; see also LaVallee v. Delle Rose, 410 U.S. 690, 694-95, 93 S.Ct. 1203, 1205-06, 35 L.Ed.2d 637 (1973). Therefore, we conclude that trial counsel did not actually know that he could have retrieved the records at issue. The fact that counsel was not told about this possibility and was otherwise unaware of it, however, does not end the inquiry. The question remains — was trial counsel’s lack of knowledge objectively reasonable? In deciding it, we must remember that Grabowski’s murder occurred in December 1982, and McAleese was convicted in June 1983. Thus, the specific question at hand is whether trial counsel’s lack of knowledge of the technology available to retrieve records of incoming telephone calls at a particular location fell beneath prevailing professional norms in late 1982 through mid-1983. The magistrate judge held that it was objectively unreasonable for trial counsel to be unaware of the phone company’s ability to identify the source of incoming long distance calls because “the petitioner’s lawyer at the post trial hearing had, apparently, no such difficulty.” Report and Recommendation at 28; App. at 1316. Beyond the fact that McAleese’s counsel during the post-trial proceedings knew of the retrieval technology, the record contains no evidence supporting the magistrate’s implicit determination that all competent lawyers should have known about the technology in 1982. Some of the questions that the prosecutors and the trial court asked during the post-verdict evidentiary hearings indicate an unfamiliarity with the retrieval technology even at that time. For example, during the post-trial proceeding, the following colloquy took place between the court and the telephone company representative: THE COURT: All right. Let me ask a few questions because I want to be absolutely sure of this. As I understand what you are telling me, Mr. Brook, you do maintain records which show out-going calls, I am taking this by steps, show out-going calls and to a designated number. THE WITNESS: If it is a toll call and it would be reflected on the bill, yes. THE COURT: Well, the ordinary telephone. THE WITNESS: A local call would not be reflected on the bill. Only toll calls would be shown on the bill. If I am using my phone to call from Philadelphia to Philadelphia, that is not on the bill. If I use my phone to call from Philadelphia to Trenton, New Jersey, it would be on the bill. THE COURT: It’s also possible, as I understand it in the same type of situation where it’s a toll call, to ascertain from records of the receiving phone the phone from which a call was made. That’s also on your tape, but in each case, these are kept for very brief periods of time, until billing has been accomplished. Is that it? THE WITNESS: Yes, the tapes are produced which we call automatic AMA tapes that are in this central office are then put into the billing computer and the bill is processed. Those other tapes are gone forever. THE COURT: No reason to keep them for a permanent record of it because you are interested in billing, rather than preserving records. THE WITNESS: Right. THE COURT: All right. App. at 803-04. In addition, the following colloquy occurred during the prosecution’s cross-examination of the telephone company representative: Q: ... You mentioned that if a person is to place a call to someone else, that the person who is calling — let’s take a local call — if somebody makes a local call in Delaware and calls somebody anywhere else in Delaware and it’s a local call, are you able to trace from either telephone where the call was made or received? A: No, sir. That is a local call and because of that, no record of that call is maintained. sji ifs ijs # :>{ Q: This retrieval system that Mr. Preminger was asking, you about as far as if I made a call from Philadelphia to Delaware, and then the person in Delaware naturally picks the phone up, and then you are asked at a later time, are you able to find out the number that was called from Philadelphia to Delaware? A: Yes, sir. Q: And what about if you only had the number of the person in Delaware, let’s say, a person comes to you and says, “I don’t know the phone number of where or who called me in Philadelphia, but here is my phone number,” are you able to then tell the person in Delaware where somebody in Philadelphia called him from? A: We could probably do that, yes, the same. Q: And that’s based on this taping system you have? A: Yes. Q: And that’s what you only keep for a short period of time. Is that correct? A: Yes. Q: As for long distance. What about for local calls? A: No, there is no record of local calls maintained. Q: So if somebody were to call — if I were to call from an anonymous phone number in Delaware and then I called let’s say 111, okay let’s say that’s somebody's] phone number, and you then went and subpoenaed or produced the numbers or the records for 111, and it was a local call, is there any way you could tell what number I called in? A: No, sir. THE COURT: In other words, toll calls are the only ones — records of toll calls are the only ones kept. THE WITNESS: Yes. THE COURT: All right. Id. at 805-07. Similarly, at the post-trial proceedings the following exchange took place during defense counsel’s direct examination of trial counsel: BY MR. GELB: #    ❖  Are you aware of a procedure whereby magnetic tapes can be obtained from the phone company which would verify whether or not a long distance call had been made from one number to another? MRS. FOULKES [for the prosecution]: Your honor, I have to object on the ground of a highly speculative premise and that premise is and I believe based on the questions of the Bell Telephone representative that had been called before that before such a communication could be investigated one would have to know from what number the telephone call was made. In other words, you couldn’t relate back from the receiving call to some unknown long distance number to determine where that call was placed unless it had been placed in a collect call situation or some situation where a recording would be made. I think we are getting into the relm [sic] of highly speculative availability of certain evidence, and to subject counsel to questioning in that regard I think really won’t further this inquiry. THE COURT: A Bell Telephone representative did appear at the last hearing as I recall and rather definitively discussed this entire situation as to whether this was possible, feasible, was it done, all that type. MRS. FOULKES: Yes. My understanding of the testimony was that where you have one number you don’t have to have both numbers. You can have one number in order to be able to determine what calls were received or what calls went out. THE COURT: From the calling number. MRS. FOULKES: The calling number, the receiving number, that’s the question. MR. GELB: The received number which in this case presumably would be Mr. Natalie’s number. That’s the point I am making and I think that was the gist of his testimony. MRS. FOULKES: That’s counsel’s interpretation of it. I will object subject to it’s [sic] being determined to be irrelevant later. That was not my understanding of the reading of that representative [sic] testimony. THE COURT: That wasn’t mine, either. However, go ahead. Id. at 972-75. Because there is no evidence in the record to support the conclusion that a competent criminal defense attorney should have known about the retrieval technology in late 1982 through mid-1983, we cannot conclude that the failure of McAleese’s trial counsel to attempt to retrieve Natalie’s phone records was objectively unreasonable. Moreover, even if trial counsel should have known of the available technology, McAleese still must show he was prejudiced by the absence of the phone records in order to prevail. The expert testimony that McAleese presented at the post-trial eviden-tiary hearing in 1985 showed only that retrieving records of incoming long distance calls was indeed possible and might have been accomplished. The expert witness testified: [I]t is possible to do that within a certain time-frame, and I am talking about a relatively short time-frame, that if a call is made to a number, we can go back over the tapes and retrieve information similar to what you are requesting, but as I said, that’s a very short time-frame [thirty to sixty days] and we do not normally do that unless it is a life and death type of situation. Id. at 800. The expert later testified that the phone company would retrieve the calls pursuant to judicial subpoena: Given that our system is not perfect within the relms [sic] of what we can do, we most likely, if we were ordered to do so, with great effort [would retrieve them]. It is not an easy thing to do, but we could probably find out where that call came from. Id. at 800-01. This testimony indicates that it was more likely than not that had trial counsel subpoenaed phone records of Natalie’s long distance calls, he probably would have gotten them. Once the records were subpoenaed, however, they would become equally available to the Commonwealth. They would have shown one of two possibilities: Either (1) a call or calls at the crucial time from Philadelphia, thus precluding the possibility of alibi, or (2) no calls from Philadelphia, thus supporting the inference that McAleese was in Wilmington or at least not in Philadelphia at the pertinent time. We have no way of knowing which. The possibility of exoneration stemming from the phone records is not enough to show “a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding, would have been different.” Strickland, 466 U.S. at 694, 104 S.Ct. at 2068. As the Strickland Court emphasized, it is not enough to show that the error may have had some “conceivable effect” on the outcome, for “not every error that conceivably could have influenced the outcome undermines the reliability of the result of the proceeding.” Id. at 693, 104 S.Ct. at 2067; see Larsen v. Maggio, 736 F.2d 215, 218 (5th Cir.) (petitioner must demonstrate that “might have beens” would have been important enough to affect proceedings’ reliability), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 1089, 105 S.Ct. 598, 83 L.Ed.2d 707 (1984). McAleese cannot contend that his trial counsel abdicated the duty to investigate recognized in Strickland. See Gray, 878 F.2d at 712 (citing Strickland, 466 U.S. at 690, 104 S.Ct. at 2065-66). The record shows that trial counsel tracked down and presented as witnesses five disinterested persons who testified as to McAleese’s whereabouts on the day of the crime. This testimony supported a plausible defense. The telephone records had the potential of destroying that defense. If the telephone records had indeed shown a call to Natalie’s office from Philadelphia at approximately 3:00 p.m. on December 1, 1982, the prosecution could have subpoenaed them as evidence in its case-in-chief against McAleese. Even assuming that trial counsel’s failure to attempt to retrieve Natalie’s phone records fell below prevailing professional norms, McAleese has not shown he suffered prejudice from the- absence of the phone records at trial. Finally, we note that the Commonwealth’s case against McAleese, while not iron-clad, was not a weak one. Cf. Strickland, 466 U.S. at 696, 104 S.Ct. at 2069 (“a verdict or conclusion only weakly supported by the record is more likely to have been affected by errors than one with overwhelming record support”); Gray, 878 F.2d at 711. Considering the brutality of the murder and all the evidence indicating McAleese did carry out his intent to call on Mrs. Grabowski about the time she was brutally murdered, we note that the defense successfully avoided a verdict of first degree or capital murder. We are unable to call such a, defense ineffective. Trial counsel may not have tried a perfect case, but a criminal defendant is not entitled to a perfect lawyer. None has ever existed. We hold that McAleese’s trial counsel was not ineffective.