Court Opinion

ID: 9470087
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:56:47.934452+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:43.501777
License: Public Domain

GARZA, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent. I would reverse and order the grant of the Great Writ.
As the facts show, Dwight Smith had just been released from a mental institution, where he had been confined for over a year. Some thirty (30) days after being released into society he committed the murder that he was convicted of. The trial judge at his murder trial was the one that had committed him to the mental institution and the one that authorized his release. These facts were known to his counsel. The failure of the trial judge and of his counsel to order a competency hearing has been condoned by the majority on the grounds that it was trial strategy to go only on a self-defense theory. The magistrate below stated that insanity and self-defense would have been contradictory defenses. I fail to see where these defenses would have been contradictory. Even an incompetent has a right to defend himself. More fundamental to me is the question of whether counsel can waive a competency hearing for a defendant, especially under the facts of the case before us. If Smith was incompetent to stand trial or insane enough to where he could plead a sanity defense, in my view, counsel could not forego this defense. Under the facts known to defense counsel and the trial judge, I find that it was error not to have given him a competency and sanity hearing. Whatever his condition is today, we will never know what his condition was at the time of the murder because no competency or sanity hearing was conducted. This failure to provide him such a hearing looms larger when we look at the record to determine whether Smith received a meaningful appeal.
The trial judge allowed his retained counsel to withdraw at the sentencing hearing and promised to appoint new counsel for him. This was not done, however, until the fifteen (15) days allowed for filing bills of exception or assignments of error had passed. More important, however, the time for filing a motion for new trial had expired by the time counsel was appointed. It was admitted at oral argument that the appointed counsel could have, in a motion for new trial, urged the incompetency of Smith to stand trial and could have developed a record on the need for such a hearing. The failure to appoint counsel for him under these circumstances, in my opinion, prevented Smith from getting a meaningful appeal.
For the above stated reasons I would reverse and grant the writ sought.