Court Opinion

ID: 9674674
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 04:33:22.034125+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:28.951966
License: Public Domain

TEAGUE, Judge,
concurring.
Although I concur in the conclusion reached in the Court’s opinion on the State’s motion for rehearing by Judge Odom that appellant never “triggered” the self-representation scheme of Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806, 95 S.Ct. 2525, 45 L.Ed.2d 562 (1975), I write to make it clear that no panacea for the difficult problem of the perjurious client has been presented here. Trial courts should not assume that the only solution, or even a proper one, is to require an attorney, who may have lost the confidence of his accused client, to continue his representation of the accused unchanged or, in hybrid form as seen in the instant case, to require the accused to accept such continued representation. For, to do so, he may not successfully navigate the oftentimes precarious attorney-client relationship and may also find himself between the rock of Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis as well as upon the rocks of procedurally hazardous passageways involving competing interests. In short, there is not and cannot be an ironclad general rule laid down by this Court in this type case as the ultimate decision a trial court reaches under one set of facts will not necessarily carry over to another case albeit their similar characteristics. The thorny problems, real, hypothetical, and imagined, simply do not lend themselves to cookbook solutions, and I urge trial judges not to take the actions of the trial judge in this case as a recipe for meeting such problems in the future.
I urge, rather, that trial courts remain alert to the ramifications of the particular case they may be confronted with and to take such steps as may be appropriate in the particular circumstances to ensure that the accused in his particular cause, under facts as presented here, has the effective and adequate representation of counsel. See also People v. Salquerro, New York Supreme Court, 433 N.Y.S.2d 711 (1980), for a further discussion of the possible perjurious client.