Court Opinion

ID: 9476175
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:49:15.143045+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:09.981547
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Because it does not seem to me that the petitioner has sustained his burden of prov*484ing that an actual conflict of interest adversely affected his lawyer’s performance, I must respectfully dissent.
Petitioner’s lawyer — who testified that he might have participated in “more than five hundred” criminal matters — was unquestionably an experienced criminal attorney. The heinous crime committed by petitioner and his co-defendants had attracted considerable notoriety (it came to be known as the “911 case” because one of the victims had dialed that emergency number and left the phone off the hook, allowing the killings to be tape recorded by the police), and petitioner’s lawyer was less than optimistic after picking the jury. “[Tjhey looked at us like we were less than human,” he testified, and “I was certain that all three would be convicted of first degree murder if the thing had proceeded to a culmination in front of a jury.”
This lawyer’s professional ethics may not have been above reproach, but I know of no reason to suppose that his judgment as to the probable outcome of the trial was anything other than informed and accurate.
If the lawyer’s potential conflict of interest merely created a hypothetical inhibition to hypothetical plea negotiations, such a conflict cannot justify the very serious step we are asked to take here. Yet the record of this case, as I read it, contains no basis for supposing that another lawyer could have negotiated any plea agreement for the petitioner in return for his testifying against his co-defendants, much less a more favorable plea agreement than that actually arrived at when all three defendants elected to plead guilty to charges of murder in the second degree.
At the evidentiary hearing conducted by the magistrate, Assistant Prosecutor Schigur testified that it was his policy, in multiple defendant cases, not to accept guilty pleas from anyone unless all of the defendants pleaded guilty. “The only exception that I ever had,” Mr. Schigur said, was that he would sometimes accept a guilty plea from a defendant “against whom I had less evidence,” going forward with the trial of the person against whom the evidence was stronger. “But if the one against whom I had the stronger case wanted to plead guilty, leaving me to try the case against the weaker — the person against whom I had less evidence, I would not consider that.”
Although the petitioner was carrying a gun when he broke into the victims’ house, it is true that he denied having fired any shots, whereas the other defendants admitted to having done so. This does not mean, however, that Mr. Schigur believed he had a stronger case against the co-defendants than he had against the petitioner. On the contrary, Mr. Schigur testified that he felt he had just as strong a case against the petitioner as against co-defendant Dorsey, “but as to Mr. Perkins, who was arrested separately from the other two, and whose preliminary examination was conducted separately from the other two, my case against him, I felt, was substantially weaker____” (Emphasis supplied.) This means that Mr. Perkins might have had some basis for hoping to be allowed to plead guilty by himself, but nothing in Mr. Schigur’s testimony suggests in any way that he would have considered accepting a guilty plea from petitioner if Mr. Perkins and the third co-defendant had not pleaded guilty as well.
The deal cut by petitioner’s counsel seems to have been an excellent one for all three of the defendants. Petitioner would doubtless have preferred to be acquitted, but that simply wasn’t in the cards. I doubt that any competent attorney would have advised petitioner to take his chances on a trial before Judge Del Rio and a jury who looked at the defendants as though they were “less than human.”
The inducement for each of the three defendants to plead guilty was a compelling one. As this court said in the case of Defendant Perkins — the defendant against whom the prosecution thought it had the weakest case—
“... the actual inducement behind Perkins’ plea was the realization, acknowledged by Perkins’ [and petitioner’s] trial counsel, that there was a strong likelihood that Perkins and his co-defendants would be convicted of first-degree mur*485der if they continued with their trial. Under Michigan law, a conviction for first-degree murder requires a life-sentence without parole; a conviction for second-degree leaves open the possibility of parole.”
Perkins v. Mintzes, No. 83-1174 (6th Cir.1984) [734 F.2d 15 (table) ], slip op. at p. 4.
Possibly in recognition of the fact that petitioner denied actually having pulled the trigger of his gun, Judge Del Rio sentenced petitioner to a lesser term than that received by the other defendants. Petitioner’s sentence left open the possibility of parole, moreover, whereas there would have been no possibility of parole if he had been convicted of first degree murder — a denouement that his experienced counsel thought highly likely, absent a guilty plea.
Although the writ of habeas corpus granted in this case is a conditional writ that permits the state of Michigan to schedule a new trial within 90 days, I question how strong a case the state could make at a new trial even if the evidence that existed more than a dozen years ago is capable of resurrection. Michigan abrogated its common law felony murder rule in 1980 (see People v. Aaron, 409 Mich. 672, 299 N.W.2d 304 (1980)), and the change in the law (a change that operates prospectively only) would seem to make a murder conviction rather less likely today than it was in 1975.
The practical effect of the writ may well be to return the petitioner to the streets, and I see no justification for a federal court doing that on the record before us.