Court Opinion

ID: 9495297
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:58:53.244305+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:55.416348
License: Public Domain

SILVERMAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The majority frames the issue as follows: “We are asked to decide whether trial counsel’s closing argument on behalf of petitioner Lionel Gentry constituted ineffective assistance of counsel.” Opinion at 1009. With all due respect, that is not the issue at all. The sole question before us is whether the California Court of Appeal’s decision was an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States. This mistake goes a long way toward explaining why the majority says virtually nothing about the holding of the California Court of Appeal. It also explains why the majority analyzes this case as if it were reviewing a direct appeal of a federal criminal trial, instead of the denial of habeas relief to a state prisoner under § 2254.
It makes a big difference. Federal ha-beas relief is not available simply because a federal court concludes “that the relevant state-court decision applied clearly established federal law erroneously or incorrectly. Rather, that application must also be unreasonable.” Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 411, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000).
The California Court of Appeal examined defense counsel’s closing argument. It pointed out that counsel “argued that he had never found a prosecutor who did not claim to know what had happened in a case, but urged the prosecutor was not present at the incident.” The court noted that counsel “commented on Williams’s various versions of his testimony” and that counsel “urged that the question was whether appellant intended to stab Handy.” The California Court of Appeal noted that counsel argued that the jury must not assume that his client was guilty just because he had a prior record. It then said:
It is settled that “[t]he effectiveness of an advocate’s oral presentation is difficult to judge from a written transcript, and the length of an argument is not a *1016sound measure of its quality.” (People v. Cudjo, (1993) 6 Cal.4th 585, 634-635, 25 Cal.Rptr.2d 390, 863 P.2d 635.) We have noted above portions of appellant’s counsel’s argument which addressed pertinent issues of appellant’s case, including the reliability of Williams’s testimony, whether appellant intended to stab [Handy], and the significance of the prior conviction impeachment evidence. Based on that, the entirety of counsel’s argument, and the overwhelming evidence of guilt, we conclude appellant was not denied his constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel. [Citations omitted.] None of the cases cited by appellant compels a contrary conclusion. [Footnote 5:] This includes U.S. v. Cronic (1984) 466 U.S. 648, 104 S.Ct. 2039, 80 L.Ed.2d 657 ... since, based on the above, counsel did not “entirely fail[ ]” to subject the prosecution’s case to meaningful adversarial test.
Judges might agree or disagree with that analysis, but it is difficult to see how it can be said to be unreasonable, especially in light of Bell v. Cone, — U.S.-, 122 S.Ct. 1843, 152 L.Ed.2d 914 (2002). In Bell, a death penalty case, defense counsel made no closing argument whatsoever. In upholding the denial of habeas relief, the Court said:
For respondent to succeed, however, he must do more than show that he would have satisfied Strickland’s test if his claim were being analyzed in the first instance, because under § 2254(d)(1), it is not enough to convince a federal habeas court that, in its independent judgment, the state-court decision applied Strickland incorrectly. Rather, he must show that the Tennessee Court of Appeals applied Stnckland to the facts of his case in an objectively unreasonable manner. This, we conclude, he cannot do.
Respondent also focuses on counsel’s decision to waive final argument. He points out that counsel could have explained the significance of his Bronze Star decoration and argues that his counsel’s failure to advocate for life in closing necessarily left the jury with the impression that he deserved to die. The Court of Appeals “rejected out of hand” the idea that waiving summation could ever be considered sound trial strategy. [Cone v. Bell] 243 F.3d [961] 979 [(6th Cir.2001)]. In this case, we think at the very least that the state court’s contrary assessment was not “unreasonable.”
122 S.Ct. at 1852, 1853-54 (citations omitted).
The Court also took the opportunity to reiterate the caution it issued in Strickland. Said the Bell Court:
[A] court must indulge a strong presumption that counsel’s conduct falls within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance because it is all too easy to conclude that a particular act or omission of counsel was unreasonable in the harsh light of hindsight.
Id. at 1854.
After Bell, there is simply no way that the California Court of Appeal decision can be characterized as so off-the-wall as to be unreasonable. To reiterate, the Court of Appeal correctly noted that counsel had identified the sole issue (was the stabbing an accident?), linked his client’s testimony to that issue, pointed out inconsistencies in the prosecution witnesses’ testimony, and attempted to deal with the very unfavorable fact that his client’s testimony had been severely impeached with several pri- or felony convictions, some of which he initially denied.
My colleagues in the majority have pointed out various things that counsel could have argued but didn’t, and things that counsel did in fact say that could have *1017been said better. The same can be said of any closing argument. The majority points out that counsel didn’t argue that the stab wound to the chest was “only” one-inch deep. That fact is not nearly as significant as the majority seems to think. What matters is that petitioner did not inflict a superficial scratch. To the contrary, the evidence showed that the stab wound Handy received occasioned a great loss of blood and required two-hours of emergency surgery by a vascular surgeon. Counsel’s decision not to draw the jury’s attention to the magnitude of the victim’s wound is entitled to a “strong presumption that counsel’s conduct falls within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance.” Bell, 122 S.Ct. at 1854.
What particularly sticks in the majority’s craw is that in attempting to deal with the evidence of his client’s bad prior record, defense counsel argued: “If you don’t think he’s lying — bad person, lousy drug addict, stinking thief, jail bird, all that to the contrary — he’s not guilty. It’s as simple as that. I don’t care if he’s been in prison. And for the sake of this thing you ought not care because that doesn’t have anything to do with what happened on April 30th, 1994.”
As Magistrate Judge Arthur Nakazato pointed out in his thorough Report and Recommendation, which was adopted by Judge Rafeedie, “The disparaging statements concerning petitioner ... and references to his criminal convictions were part of defense counsel’s strategy to establish some degree of credibility with the jury by conceding his past acts, while simultaneously emphasizing that his bad character was irrelevant to the issue before the jury.”
Ironically, the majority resorts to the same sort of rhetorical device when its says:
[Petitioner’s] version of the events is not, of course, the only one worthy of credence. Far from it. The record shows that at trial he was agitated, confused, and evasive. He may have deliberately lied about his past convictions, though it is impossible to discern why he would do so, especially when the first questions about them were posed by his counsel. Little of [petitioner’s] testimony may, in fact be true, even in the light of the evidence suggesting the possible defense of accident. But none of this alters trial counsel’s duty to meet an objective standard of reasonableness in representing his client during closing argument.
Opinion at 1014.
Perhaps other lawyers would have handled the knotty problem of petitioner’s lengthy rap sheet differently — or, indeed, the entire argument differently. No matter. The only thing that does matter is whether the California Court of Appeal was unreasonable — not just wrong, but unreasonable — in ruling that petitioner was not denied effective assistance of counsel. Since counsel’s closing argument was no worse than no-elosing-argument-at-all, as occurred in the Supreme Court case of Bell v. Cone, it follows that the California Court of Appeal cannot be said to have unreasonably applied federal law as determined by the Supreme Court. Therefore, I respectfully dissent.