Court Opinion

ID: 9479814
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:29:37.028914+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:17.709196
License: Public Domain

TJOFLAT, Chief Judge,
concurring:
I concur in the opinion of the court. I write separately because I would take a different approach to petitioner’s ineffective assistance of counsel claim.
Petitioner Thomas was charged with robbing and murdering, but not with raping, Quenette Shehane. Prior to trial, Thomas’ trial counsel moved in limine to exclude any evidence tending to show that Shehane had been raped. The trial court denied the motion. At trial, the State introduced evidence tending to show that Shehane had been raped, and, in closing argument, the prosecutor suggested that Shehane had been sexually abused before she was killed. In his federal habeas petition, Thomas claimed that his trial counsel rendered ineffective assistance, in violation of Thomas’ sixth and fourteenth amendment rights to counsel, by failing to object on either occasion.
The opinion of the court approaches Thomas’ ineffective assistance of counsel claim obliquely, detouring unnecessarily through federal habeas cases in which federal courts have deferred to state trial court evidentiary rulings, provided those rulings did not deprive the petitioner of due process.1 It eventually concludes that evidence of rape was admissible even over objection and that Thomas’ counsel did not, therefore, perform defectively by failing to object. I would approach the ineffective assistance of counsel claim more directly.
When analyzing an ineffective assistance of counsel claim, we begin with the familiar two-part Strickland inquiry, see Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 2064, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984): was counsel’s performance deficient, and, if so, did the deficient performance prejudice the defendant? The standard for measuring deficient performance is an objective one: “reasonableness under prevailing professional norms.” Id. at 688, 104 S.Ct. at 2065. Furthermore, a reviewing court’s scrutiny of counsel’s performance should be highly deferential. Id. at 689-90, 104 *1507S.Ct. at 2065-66 (there is “strong presumption that counsel’s conduct falls within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance”; defendant must overcome presumption that challenged action “might be considered sound trial strategy”).
Thomas’ trial counsel attempted, in his unsuccessful pretrial motion, to prevent the State from bringing potentially prejudicial evidence of rape to the jury’s attention. By the time of trial, however, he had adopted a different strategy, as he explained at the coram nobis hearing in the state court. He based petitioner’s defense at trial on the theory that petitioner was not present when Shehane was killed. Counsel regarded the State’s evidence of a dried semen stain found on the front seat of Shehane’s car as relevant and almost certainly admissible to show the circumstances of the crime.2 He feared that objecting to the state’s introduction of the semen stain into evidence would only draw attention to the matter and would suggest that the defense “had something to hide.” Therefore, rather than objecting to its introduction, he chose to discredit the evidence by establishing, on cross-examination of the State’s forensic expert, that no tests had been performed that indicated any connection between the stain and petitioner or even that the stain was fresh at the time of the crime.
For similar reasons, counsel did not object to the prosecutor’s allusions to sexual abuse during closing argument. Counsel believed that the allegedly unwarranted comments were no more than permissible inferences from the evidence that had been properly introduced. Still basing his defense on the theory that petitioner was elsewhere at the time of the crime, counsel decided not to risk creating the appearance that petitioner had anything to fear from the suggestion that Shehane had been sexually abused before she was killed.
This is surely the kind of tactical decision that Strickland cautions us not to second-guess. This court itself has stated that “[t]he sixth amendment right to effective assistance of counsel does not require counsel to raise every objection without regard to its merits.” Palmes v. Wainwright, 725 F.2d 1511, 1523 (11th Cir.), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 873, 105 S.Ct. 227, 83 L.Ed.2d 156 (1984). Counsel had a reasonable expectation that the evidence tending to show rape would have been admitted even over his objection; he made a reasonable decision to minimize the impact of the evidence and to discredit it by showing, on cross-examination, that the State had established no connection between the evidence and his client.
Accordingly, I agree with the court that counsel’s performance, in failing to object either to the introduction of evidence tending to show rape or to the prosecutor’s suggestion that the victim had been sexually abused, did not fall below an objective standard of reasonableness.

. In his habeas petition to the district court, Thomas claimed also that the trial court’s admission of evidence of a sexual attack and the prosecutor’s references to sexual abuse during closing argument denied him the due process of law. The district court held that these claims were procedurally defaulted, and, on appeal, Thomas does not challenge that holding. Thomas’ ineffective assistance of counsel claim is based on the sixth amendment right to counsel, made applicable to the states through the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. See Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 83 S.Ct. 792, 9 L.Ed.2d 799 (1963).

. The opinion of this court, showing that evidence of sexual abuse at the time of the killing was admissible under Alabama law, ante at 1505, confirms the reasonableness of counsel’s assessment. The state trial court’s denial of the motion in limine gave counsel additional reason to believe that an objection at trial to the introduction of the evidence would not meet with success.