Court Opinion

ID: 9755639
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 20:45:01.718047+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:09.851256
License: Public Domain

Justice CASTILLE,
concurring and dissenting.
Although I concur in the Majority Opinion’s resolution of appellant’s collateral claims concerning the guilt phase of trial, I respectfully dissent from its decision to remand for an evidentiary hearing on appellant’s layered claim of ineffective assistance of counsel arising from the prosecution’s reference, during the penalty phase, to appellant’s selective invocation of a right to remain silent during a psychiatric examination. In finding that this claim has arguable merit, the Majority imposes an absurd requirement that, when this case was tried in 1985, appellant’s trial counsel was obliged to anticipate that, in the next year, the U.S. Supreme Court would issue its decision in Wainwright v. Greenfield, 474 U.S. 284, 106 S.Ct. 634, 88 L.Ed.2d 623 (1986), which extended the rule first announced in *209Doyle v. Ohio, 426 U.S. 610, 96 S.Ct. 2240, 49 L.Ed.2d 91 (1976), concerning restrictions upon the use of post-Miranda,1 silence. In addition to relying upon a point of law established in the 1986 decision of Wainwright v. Greenfield, the Majority invokes an even later decision from this Court, Commonwealth v. DiPietro, 588 Pa. 382, 648 A.2d 777 (1994), for two propositions essential to its holding that a remand is required: (1) first, it cites DiPietro to reject the Commonwealth’s claim that appellant did not remain silent, but selectively answered questions; (2) second, it cites DiPietro (as well as Doyle) as controlling the question of whether the reference was such as to sustain appellant’s burden of proving prejudice under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 689, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984) and Commonwealth v. Pierce, 515 Pa. 153, 527 A.2d 973 (1987). Majority op. at 203-05, 855 A.2d at 775, 776.
The trial in this case occurred in January and February of 1985; the penalty phase comments of the prosecutor, to which appellant now claims counsel, using foresight, was obliged to object, occurred on February 7, 1985. The fundamental flaw in appellant’s claim of counsel ineffectiveness, and the consequent fundamental error in the Majority’s analysis, is that it depends upon a case, Wainwright v. Greenfield, which did not exist in February of 1985. As Mr. Justice (now Chief Justice) Cappy noted in Commonwealth v. Rollins, 558 Pa. 532, 738 A.2d 435, 451 (1999), it is a settled rule that “we will not deem counsel ineffective for failing to anticipate a change in the law.” The cases recognizing this fundamental principle are legion and the principle bedrock.
The requirement that counsel’s conduct be viewed in light of contemporaneously-governing law is central to any rational assessment of the constitutional reasonableness of counsel’s actions. As this Court stated in Commonwealth v. Bond, 572 Pa. 588, 819 A.2d 33 (2002):
“A fair assessment of attorney performance requires that every effort be made to eliminate the distorting effects of hindsight, to reconstruct the circumstances of counsel’s *210challenged conduct, and to evaluate the conduct from counsel’s perspective at the time.” Strickland, 466 U.S. at 689, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674. This is so because it is “all too tempting” for a defendant to second-guess counsel, and “all too easy” for a court to deem a particular act or omission unreasonable merely because counsel’s overall strategy did not achieve the result his client desired. Id.See also Lockhart [v. Fretwell], 506 U.S. [364,] 372, 113 S.Ct. 838, 122 L.Ed.2d 180 [ (1993) ] (Strickland Court adopted “the rule of contemporary assessment” because it recognized that “from the perspective of hindsight there is a natural tendency to speculate as to whether a different trial strategy might have been more successful”); Waters v. Thomas, 46 F.3d 1506, 1514 (11th Cir.1995) (“nothing is clearer than hindsight—except perhaps the rule that we will not judge trial counsel’s performance through hindsight”).
819 A.2d at 51. Neither lawyers nor trial judges are expected or required to be clairvoyant. Deeming counsel to be ineffective for failing to forward an objection based upon a principle of law that was not then-governing is the very essence of the sort of perverse second-guessing which is not permitted under Strickland and its progeny.
On the performance prong of the Strickland test, the only proper question here is whether, under the governing federal law existing in February of 1985, trial counsel unreasonably failed to forward the objection appellant now alleges that he was obliged to forward. As a matter of law, the fact that an arguably similar claim succeeded the next year in the U.S. Supreme Court cannot control the Strickland performance question. Notwithstanding the Majority’s insistence otherwise, Doyle and Wainwright v. Greenfield are very different cases, and while Wainwright v. Greenfield certainly derived from the teaching of Doyle—as all but the most earth-shattering of Supreme Court decisions find their roots in some past precedent—Wainwright v. Greenfield represented a significant extension of the Doyle rule. Wainwright v. Greenfield did not, for example, consist of a per curiam order accompanied by the notation, “See Doyle.” In Doyle, the U.S. Su*211preme Court determined that when a defendant’s silence follows upon issuance of Miranda warnings, it is “insolubly ambiguous,” and cannot be used against him at trial for impeachment purposes. Extending the rule announced in Doyle, Wainwright v. Greenfield held that the prosecution cannot employ the defendant’s post-arrest, post -Miranda silence as evidence of his sanity, in an attempt to rebut an insanity defense.
Wainwright v. Greenfield involved federal habeas review of a Florida state prisoner’s conviction for sexual battery. The defendant exercised his right to remain silent after he was arrested and issued Miranda warnings. He later pleaded guilty by reason of insanity, a plea which, under Florida law, required the prosecution to prove his sanity beyond a reasonable doubt. In an attempt to satisfy that burden, the prosecution introduced testimony from two police officers who described post-arrest instances in which the defendant had exercised his right to remain silent and expressed a desire to consult with counsel before answering any questions. Subsequently, in his closing argument, the prosecutor reviewed the officers’ testimony and suggested that the defendant’s refusals to answer questions without consulting counsel showed a degree of comprehension that was inconsistent with his claim of insanity. The defendant was found guilty.
On habeas review of the defendant’s properly preserved and exhausted claim that the use of his silence to rebut the claim of insanity violated due process, the Supreme Court affirmed the ruling of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals that the defendant was entitled to relief. The state of Florida argued that employing silence to prove sanity was significantly different than employing it to prove factual commission of the charged offense, and therefore, the due process rationale of Doyle did not apply. The Supreme Court rejected this distinction, as follows:
The point of the Doyle holding is that it is fundamentally unfair to promise an arrested person that his silence will not be used against him and thereafter to breach that promise *212by using the silence to impeach his trial testimony. It is equally unfair to breach that promise by using silence to overcome a defendant’s plea of insanity. In both situations, the State gives warnings to protect constitutional rights and implicitly promises that any exercise of those rights will not be penalized. In both situations, the State then seeks to make use of the defendant’s exercise of those rights in obtaining his conviction. The implicit promise, the breach, and the consequent penalty are identical in both situations.
474 U.S. at 292, 106 S.Ct. at 639.
Florida also argued that a suspect’s comprehension of Miranda warnings, as evidenced by his silence, is far more probative of sanity than of commission of the underlying offense and, therefore, Doyle’s concern with the “insolubly ambiguous” character of the post -Miranda warnings silence in that case was not present in the context of silence used to rebut an insanity defense. The Court declined to evaluate the probative value of the silence in Wainwright v. Greenfield, characterizing Doyle’s discussion of the ambiguity of silence as “merely added weight to the Court’s principal rationale, which rested on the implied assurance contained in the Miranda warning.” Wainwright, 474 U.S. at 293-94, 106 S.Ct. at 639-40. This is the first instance where the Court so narrowed Doyle’s rationale.
I respectfully disagree with the Majority’s conclusion that the objectionable nature of the penalty phase references to silence in this case—which were employed not to impeach a denial of criminal responsibility with insolubly ambiguous silence, but instead as a response to a defense assertion of the mental health mitigating circumstance in the penalty phase— was made plain by Doyle alone, and does not depend upon Wainwright v. Greenfield’s extension of the Doyle rationale. I do not dispute that creative lawyers operating in the post-Doyle, pre.-Wainwright v. Greenfield world could have seen the logic in the extension and advocated for such a holding, as Greenfield’s lawyer did. But, the question before us is one of reasonable competence under the Sixth Amendment and the circumstances in Wainwright v. Greenfield were so obviously *213distinct from Doyle that I do not believe that the U.S. Supreme Court would deem a lawyer to be incompetent for having failed to anticipate that decision.
It is significant in this regard that the U.S. Supreme Court still has not spoken on the issue of the retroactive application of the Wainwright v. Greenfield rule, much less the question of counsel ineffectiveness for failing to anticipate that extension or, as the Majority would have it, application of the rule. Notably, the single case that the Majority cites in arguing that Doyle commands its result, Thomas v. State of Indiana, 910 F.2d 1413 (7th Cir.1990), is distinguishable because it did not involve an ineffective assistance of counsel claim, but instead involved federal habeas corpus review of a state prisoner’s preserved DoylefWainwright claim, which had been rejected in state court. The fact that one of the twelve Circuits believes that the rule in Wainwright v. Greenfield was not “new” for purposes of federal habeas retroactivity purposes does not mean that the Sixth Amendment automatically obliged counsel to predict that extension of the old rule—or, to predict the case that, in the view of the Thomas court, “made explicit what was ... implicit.” Thomas, 910 F.2d at 1416. In conflating and confusing two distinct areas of law—comity-based limitations upon federal courts retroactively applying new constitutional rules to state trials upon habeas review versus substantive ineffective assistance of counsel standards under the Sixth Amendment—which are aimed at very different problems, the Majority goes astray. Though Wainwright v. Greenfield certainly derived from Doyle, it extended Doyle to a new and distinct scenario, and therefore, counsel here cannot be faulted, in hindsight, for failing to anticipate the extension. Thus, appellant’s underlying claim respecting trial counsel fails as a matter of law.
I also respectfully disagree with the Majority’s manner of assessing the prejudice allegedly resulting from counsel’s failure to forward an objection based upon the then-non-existent decision in Wainwright v. Greenfield. In evaluating prejudice, the Majority does not cite to Strickland/Pierce cases, but instead, to cases assessing prejudice in a direct review para*214digm. Doyle and its progeny are, of course, federal constitutional restrictions upon state criminal trials; and defaulted Doyle-type claims collaterally raised under the guise of ineffective assistance of counsel are subject to the usual, heightened standard of Strickland prejudice. See, e.g., Hook v. Iowa, 307 F.3d 756, 758 (8th Cir.2002), cert. denied, 538 U.S. 929, 123 S.Ct. 1586, 155 L.Ed.2d 324 (2003) (finding no prejudice under Strickland in failing to forward Doyle/Wainwright objection); Pitts v. Anderson, 122 F.3d 275, 279-80 (5th Cir.1997) (assessing counsel’s performance in failing to forward Doyle objection under Strickland test, for purposes of determining whether cause existed for state procedural default); Stokes v. Procunier, 744 F.2d 475, 483 (5th Cir.1984) (counsel unreasonably failed to object to Doyle violation, but no Strickland prejudice). The Majority errs in applying a diluted version of the prejudice test. See Commonwealth v. Williams, 566 Pa. 553, 782 A.2d 517, 524-25 (2001); Commonwealth v. Howard, 538 Pa. 86, 645 A.2d 1300, 1307-08 (1994).
I am aware that, in Commonwealth v. Clark, 533 Pa. 579, 626 A.2d 154 (1993)—a case involving a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel in failing to object to a classic Doyle violation involving impeachment of the accused with his post-arrest silence—this Court’s summary analysis of the question of prejudice failed to perceive a distinction between the direct appeal harmless error standard and the prejudice required to prove ineffective assistance of counsel. Id. at 158. The vitality of Clark’s approach to prejudice is obviously faulty given subsequent decisions by this Court such as Howard and Williams, which have recognized the crucial distinction in the tests. Moreover, it is notable that the Clark Court recognized that Pierce, 515 Pa. 153, 527 A.2d 973, provided the governing standard in this regard. 626 A.2d at 157. Pierce, of course, explicitly held that the Pennsylvania approach to claims of counsel ineffectiveness is the same as the Strickland test, including the test for prejudice. See 527 A.2d at 976-77 (construing tests as establishing “an identical rule of law in this Commonwealth”). To the extent Clark may be read as seeing no distinction in the tests, it is squarely at odds with *215Pierce and, via Pierce, squarely at odds with governing precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court, which has held that prejudice will be presumed in conjunction with claims of ineffective assistance of counsel only in three narrow categories of cases, i.e., situations involving (1) an actual denial of •counsel, (2) state interference with counsel’s assistance, or (3) an actual conflict of interest burdening counsel. See Bell v. Cone, 535 U.S. 685, 695-96 n. 3, 122 S.Ct. 1843, 1850-51 n. 3, 152 L.Ed.2d 914 (2002); Mickens v. Taylor, 535 U.S. 162, 166, 122 S.Ct. 1237, 1240-41, 152 L.Ed.2d 291 (2002); United States v. Cronic, 466 U.S. 648, 658, 104 S.Ct. 2039, 2046, 80 L.Ed.2d 657 (1984). None of those situations is .implicated here. Thus, appellant is required to prove actual Strickland prejudice, i.e., he must demonstrate “a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would'have been different.” Strickland, 466 U.S. at 694, 104 S.Ct. at 2068.2
Next, I note that, in passing upon appellant’s claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, the Majority does not make it plain that it appreciates that federal claims are at issue and that it is federal law which governs those claims. Indeed, the Majority cites no federal cases in this regard. It may be that the Majority’s omission derives from the very fact that this Court has explicitly recognized that the Pennsylvania constitutional test for counsel ineffectiveness is the same as the federal Strickland test-albeit we further refíne the Strickland performance and prejudice approach into a three-part inquiry into arguable merit and absence of objective reasonable basis (performance component) and prejudice. E.g. Commonwealth v. Bomar, 573 Pa. 426, 826 A.2d 831, 855, n. 19 (2003); Bond, *216819 A.2d at 41-42; Pierce. Despite the clarity of these pronouncements, the failure of Pennsylvania courts to explicitly acknowledge the federal nature of such claims has led to avoidable complications when matters pass on to federal habeas corpus review. See, e.g., Rompilla v. Horn, 355 F.3d 233, 246-50 (3d Cir.2004); Werts v. Vaughn, 228 F.3d 178, 203 (3d Cir.2000), cert. denied, 532 U.S. 980, 121 S.Ct. 1621, 149 L.Ed.2d 483 (2001). In one instance, a Third Circuit panel inexplicably seized upon the failure of a Superior Court panel to include a citation to any federal case when applying the Strickland/Pierce test as a reason to ignore the Superior Court’s analysis of the ineffectiveness claim and the deferential standard of review required by the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Everett v. Beard, 290 F.3d 500 (3d Cir.2002), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 1107, 123 S.Ct. 877, 154 L.Ed.2d 777 (2003). As a matter of clarity and comity, and to facilitate appropriate federal habeas review should it occur, I would make it abundantly plain to our esteemed federal brethren, where the Majority does not, that this Court recognizes that appellant presents his claims of ineffective assistance of counsel under federal law and that the test for ineffective assistance of counsel stated and applied today is the same under the Pennsylvania Constitution as it is under the United States Constitution.
I think it is particularly important to make clear what law we are applying in analyzing appellant’s Strickland/Doyle/Wainwright v. Greenfield issue. As appellant notes, Brief of Appellant, 67 n. 40, this Court has invoked the Pennsylvania Constitution to go farther than the U.S. Supreme Court in extending the temporal coverage of the Doyle proscription. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Turner, 499 Pa. 579, 454 A.2d 537, 539 (1982) (rejecting Fletcher v. Weir, 455 U.S. 603, 102 S.Ct. 1309, 71 L.Ed.2d 490 (1982) under aegis of Pennsylvania Constitution and extending Doyle to post-arrest, pre-Miranda scenario). The present claim, however, sounds in ineffective assistance of counsel and it is settled that the test in that instance is coterminous. This Court should make that point explicitly.
*217Finally, I disagree with the Majority’s decision to “hold in abeyance” appellant’s remaining penalty phase issues pending remand. I do not agree with such a piecemeal approach, which could conceivably lead to unnecessary delay in the form of multiple reviews by this Court and multiple remands.
Justice EAKIN joins this concurring and dissenting opinion.

. See Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966).

. In this regard, I note that the references to silence here were not used to suggest appellant’s guilt, but rather, only to rebut appellant's evidence of a mental health mitigating circumstance. None of the questions that appellant refused to answer went to the facts of the crime; rather they went only to appellant's mental capacity. It is also notable that here, unlike in a case such as the Thomas case invoked by the Majority, the references were not to “pure silence,” but rather to the fact that, for purposes of the penalty phase mental health defense, appellant was capable of rational reasoning by selectively choosing which questions to respond to and which ones not to respond to.