Court Opinion

ID: 9753457
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 19:14:47.588242+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:35.086441
License: Public Domain

FARRELL, Associate Judge,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment:
I agree that this conviction must be reversed for ineffective assistance of counsel. What the experienced trial judge described as a “grievous” misjudgment — or, as a practical matter, failure to exercise judgment — by defense counsel in opening the door to the photographic identification by Choi still warrants that description despite the government’s effort on appeal to rehabilitate it. So, although ordinarily a single misstep by counsel should not be enough to make out deficient performance under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984), I concur with Judge Ruiz that counsel’s performance in inviting an identification that contradicted the defense’s own strategy of misidentification “fell below an objective standard of reasonableness.” Id. at 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052.1
The issue of whether counsel’s error creates “a reasonable probability that, but for *113[that] error[ ], the result of the proceeding would have been different,” id. at 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052, is much closer., The Chief Judge is right that (as the trial judge recalled) the defense scored no knock-out blows in cross-examining McGill, the government’s primary witness. But the truth is that we cannot know what impeachment weight the jury gave to his motive, as one awaiting sentence for the same murdér, to furnish testimony acceptable to the prosecution; in a case such as this corroboration may be all-important. What gives me substantial pause on the issue of prejudice is the successive statements appellant himself gave the police which ended up putting him on the scene (outside the store), and could reasonably be taken by the jury as falsely exculpatory. Nevertheless, it is plausible for me to imagine the jury, or individual members of it, poised on the edge of reasonable doubt if that evidence — McGill’s testimony and appellant’s statements — were all the proof of guilt it had before it.2 And the Choi identification provided a potentially clinching piece of corroboration by a witness with no motive other than to convict the actual killer of his friend. Choi’s identification was uncertain, as the Chief Judge points out, but the prosecutor made much of it in both opening and rebuttal summation — in particular, exploiting appellant’s admission to the police that he had later cut his hair, thus helping explain Choi’s uncertainty. Besides spending two transcript pages of his initial closing on the identification,3 the prosecutor returned immediately to it at the start of rebuttal, emphasizing that Choi “was a very careful man” who “could not be one hundred percent sime of the photo of Mr. Chatm[o]n because the subject he observed commit the robbery had more hair” — something explained by the *114visit to the barber. The prosecutor went on to connect the identifications by Choi and McGill, as he had before, as mutually supporting:
And, ladies and gentlemen, the photo spread may not be the greatest but it included the two people who committed this robbery, Mr. McGill tells you that. He is in that photo spread, and remem-' ber Mr. Cho[i] picked Mr. McGill’s photo saying he looked familiar, and he was right, he was right.
And when he said the same thing about Mr. Chatm[o]n looking familiar he was right because Mr. McGill told you Mr. Chatm[o]n was the second person.
It therefore cannot be said — and the prosecutor did not argue — that the government’s case came down to the credibility of McGill unsubstantiated by Choi’s identification.
If the test for prejudice under Strickland were whether it is “more likely than not” that Choi’s identification made the difference between conviction and a jury conclusion of reasonable doubt, I would not vote to reverse. But, as the Court stated there, “The result of a proceeding can be rendered unreliable, and hence the proceeding itself unfair, even if the errors of counsel cannot be shown by a preponderance of the evidence to have determined the outcome.” 466 U.S. at 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052. For me, the prosecutor’s own recognition of the importance of Choi’s identification confirms the required “reasonable probability,” id., that a different result would have occurred had defense counsel not opened the door to that evidence. The prejudice he thereby created is “sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome.” Id.4
Because we reverse on this ground, I do not associate myself with Judge Ruiz’s treatment of the issue of the prosecutor’s use of the photographs of the victim in closing argument, which has the character of lengthy dictum. It is enough to admonish, as the judge effectively did when he instructed the jury sua sponte not to be inflamed by the gruesome aspects of the case, that a prosecutor jeopardizes a conviction by excessive zeal in brandishing photographs of this sort while asking the jury “to make a decision that you can live with.”

. Unlike Judge Ruiz, ante at-, I would not decide the question whether Strickland’s objective reasonableness standard permits ex post consideration of a tactic defense counsel might reasonably have had in mind even though it is not one he states he was pursuing. It is unnecessary to decide that issue because the government’s proffered justifications for counsel's conduct here do not make out a reasonable trial strategy under any analysis.

. I discount, as the government did at the post-conviction hearing, the unspecific eyewitness testimony of Walker.

. Now you remember Detective Wheeler testified about when Mr. Cho[i] looked at some photographs, and you will get to see the photographs. They weren’t really discussed during the trial but you will get to see them, they are joint exhibits from the Government and from the Defense.
Mr. Cho[i] looked at those photographs and you will get to look at them closer yourselves. Now you can judge when you look at them how many of these photographs, how well these photographs look like the two people but Mr. Cho[i] picked out two photographs out of this group, these two photographs. And lo and behold, whose photograph did he pick out? Kevin McGill and Carlton Chatm[o]n.
And then Mr. Chofi] told you that — he gave a statement in Korean because that's his native language and you will get to read what his statement said. The first picture he talked about was Mr. McGill’s picture and he said “I’m not quite sure but the face looks similar to that of the robber whom I saw on the day I was robbed, but again, I am not so sure, the face looks very familiar, though.” Well, guess what? Mr. Chofi] was right when he picked out that very familiar face because Kevin McGill himself told you, yes, I was one of those two guys.
And then Mr. [Choi] picked out a second photograph and about that photograph he said, "The face looks familiar, I don't know for sure that he was the one who came in and robbed the store, but the face looks familiar. The robber’s hair seemed a little longer than the one in the picture.” Guess what again? That very familiar face appeared to Mr. Chofi] for a reason and that reason is Kevin McGill told you was because this man was the man that helped him do the robbery and the murder.
Now Mr. Chofi] said that the hair looked a little shorter. Remember what Detective Will had told you? When he spoke to Mr. Chatm[o]n on July 13 th, four days after the murder, Mr. Chatm[o]n told him "I cut my hair two days ago.” That would have been on July 11th. And so when Mr. Chofi] said his hair looked longer at the time of the murder, he was right, his face was familiar for a reason because the evidence suggests beyond a reasonable doubt this was the man with the shotgun.

. If on subsequent analysis by the trial court, Choi’s identification were found reliable and thus admissible despite what the prosecutor conceded was the glaring suggestivity of the photo array, reversal might seem — in’ retrospect — to have little point since appellant would again be confronted with the identification on retrial. But we obviously cannot anticipate the result of such an analysis, and what defense counsel's actions did was deprive appellant of the fruit of the prosecutor's apparent best judgment at the time that the identification was not admissible, or at least not in his interest to use.