Court Opinion

ID: 9745471
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 23:00:31.889277+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:26:24.950626
License: Public Domain

HOWERTON, J., dissenting: I respectfully dissent. A defendant in a criminal case who chooses to defend by claiming someone else committed the crime must prove, not merely suggest, that that someone else in fact committed that crime. (See People v. Bruce (1989), 185 Ill. App. 3d 356, 541 N.E.2d 708, appeal denied (1990), 129 Ill. 2d 566, 550 N.E.2d 559; People v. Bryant (1982), 105 Ill. App. 3d 285, 434 N.E.2d 316; People v. Velillari (1980), 84 Ill. App. 3d 333, 405 N.E.2d 466.) Since counsel is presumed to know the law, defense counsel in this case must be taken to have known of this requirement. In this case, however, counsel did not prove the guilt of someone else and in fact did not even begin to undertake that proof. Instead, counsel suggested that a man named Robbins rather than defendant was guilty and “wafted” this suggestion into the jury box by innuendo and by asking questions to which objections were sustained. In tandem with this improper technique, counsel, on cross-examination of the victim, the only eyewitness to this crime, established that she drank a pint of vodka, a “couple” of shots of whiskey, a shot of vodka, and some beer, and then went home to her apartment. It was the dead of night. She went in. She heard someone enter her apartment. The lights were off. It was dark. Her eyesight was so bad she is legally blind. She never saw whoever came in. She turned away to get her robe. She was hit on the back of the head. She fell facedown, rolled over and was kicked in the side and cut on the face and passed out. This seems to me to be a pretty “fair-to-middlin’ ” job of establishing that the victim, the only so-called, “eye” witness, lacked the ability and opportunity to see her assailant, and therefore, her credibility was suspect when she identified defendant. Defense counsel may be generally competent or generally incompetent. We do not know, nor do we care, about general competence, for that is not the test. We care, rather, only about counsel’s performance in this specific case, and we can judge it only from what we see in the record. I believe that implicit in Strickland v. Washington (1984), 466 U.S. 668, 80 L. Ed. 2d 674, 104 S. Ct. 2052, is the notion that a case should be reversed for incompetency of counsel’s performance when incompetency is the only reasonable inference that can be drawn from the record. In this case, however, there are two reasonable inferences that may be drawn from the record: (1) the one the majority has drawn; and (2) the one which I have not expressly stated herein, but have imbedded in the facts above and allowed the reader to draw unassisted. There being two inferences, one of which adds up to standing sort of at shadow’s edge of impropriety, but competent lawyering nevertheless, I must dissent.