Court Opinion

ID: 9681601
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 07:53:06.339058+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:34.730191
License: Public Domain

MEYERS, Judge,
concurring.
I agree that appellant was afforded reasonably effective assistance of counsel in this case according to the applicable standard. Ex parte Duffy, 607 S.W.2d 607 (Tex.Crim.App.1980). But I do not agree that the failure of a defense attorney to interpose novel or debatable objections at trial can never fall below the threshold level of reasonable representation to which every person on trial for his life or liberty is entitled. Accordingly, I cannot join the opinion of the Court.
Appellant faced a difficult choice at the penalty phase of her trial in this case. Having earlier testified to facts which, if true, would have acquitted her, and knowing that the jury did not believe her testimony, she must have regarded all her available options as equally unattractive. On the one hand, to repeat the same story she gave during the adjudication phase of trial would undoubtedly have made her seem unrepentant to the jury. Yet to confess her guilt after earlier denying it under oath would surely have opened her to a perjury prosecution. Of course, she could have declined to testify altogether. But, by offering no personal testimony at all in mitigation of her punishment, she might well have lost her best chance at lenity from the jury.
Given these choices, it is little wonder that she now wishes there had been others, particularly that she could have testified at the punishment phase without being subjected to any further inquiry regarding her culpability for the charged crime. To achieve this end, it is conceivable that she might have prospectively claimed a privilege against self-incrimination before taking the stand. But such a maneuver would have been awkward at best, and probably counterproductive in any event. Given the circumstances of this case, therefore, I cannot say that the decision to maintain her innocence even at the punishment phase of trial rather than to refuse further comment on self-incrimination grounds was a necessarily implausible trial strategy. See Hathorn v. State, 848 S.W.2d 101, 120 (Tex.Crim.App.1992), cert. denied 509 U.S. 932, 113 S.Ct. 3062, 125 L.Ed.2d 744; Johnson v. State, 614 S.W.2d 148 (Tex.Crim.App.1981)(panel opinion). To this extent, at least, I agree with the Court’s disposition.
What disturbs me, however, is the Court’s holding of apparently general application that “[a]n ineffective assistance of counsel claim cannot be based on alleged error of counsel when the case law evaluating counsel’s actions and decisions in that instance was nonexistent or not definitive.” Op. at 568. Read in context of the Court’s opinion as a whole, this proposition is evidently meant to foreclose any successful challenge to the trial effectiveness of counsel upon the basis of his omission to act whenever the law arguably supporting such action is “unclear” or “less-than-well-settled.” Op. at 566, 568.
In support of this extreme position, the Court cites only Ex parte Davis, 866 S.W.2d 234, 241 (Tex.Crim.App.1993), in which we held that a defense attorney was not ineffective merely because he chose not to object when the prosecutor argued during the punishment phase of a capital murder trial that the terms “intentional” and “deliberate” mean the same thing. That argument, although later held by this Court to be objectionable, was a plausible interpretation of the law at the time it was made. Indeed, the defense attorney in that ease himself urged the jury to accept, without objection from the prosecutor, a different, but equally plausible, interpretation of the word “deliberate,” which was also subsequently held by this Court to be objectionable. We observed that both arguments were “certainly within the realm of objective reasonableness” and that to hold otherwise merely on the basis subsequent developments in the case law would be to judge counsel by hindsight, a method expressly disapproved by the United States Supreme Court in Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 690, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 2065-2066, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984). Davis, 866 S.W.2d at 241.
*570In my view, Davis does not stand for any general proposition of law concerning the duty of an attorney representing a criminal defendant to make novel or debatable objections in defense of his client. As I understand our rationale in that case, it was not because a defense attorney need never anticipate or contend for change or progress in the decisional law that we considered counsel’s performance to be adequate, but rather because a defense attorney’s performance at trial must be judged by contemporary conditions, including the condition of contemporary-jurisprudence, not by subsequent developments in the case law.
By this reckoning, the instant cause comes to us in a significantly different posture than did Davis. In this ease there have been no important developments in the law affecting the likelihood that a novel or controversial objection such as the one appellant thinks her counsel should have made at trial would be sustained. Accordingly, she is not contending that his performance should be judged with the improved hindsight of lawyers from the future. Rather, she claims only that, had he made the objection she now thinks he should have made, he would have been entitled to the requested relief under existing law.
Unlike the Court, I am inclined to think that there are some instances in which competent defense attorneys do not meet their constitutionally obligation to render effective assistance of counsel unless they raise objections or pursue other strategies concerning which the law is not entirely well-settled. Without elaborating this view at length, it seems likely to me that such an obligation exists under circumstances where the objection or other strategy is widely discussed and often attempted throughout the legal community in which the attorney practices, is clearly advantageous to the defendant or is the most promising defensive strategy available, and has few or no significant disadvantages for the defendant. While I agree with the Court that we need not decide whether the objection appellant thinks her trial attorney should have made in this case was of such a kind, I would decline to decide it only because the record does not persuasively demonstrate that his failure to object could not have been the product of a plausible trial strategy. I would not go on, as the Court does, to adopt the dubious and unnecessary proposition that competent trial lawyers never have a constitutional obligation to make objections, assert rights, or pursue strategies which are less than well-settled.
For these reasons, I concur in the judgment of the Court only.