Court Opinion

ID: 9589819
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:49:00.664081+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:03:57.059367
License: Public Domain

Hall, Justice,
dissenting.
Like the Justices who join the per curiam opinion, I also pause at the flagrant Bruton violation presented by this record; but unlike them I am willing to consider the possibility that counsel had some intelligent reason not to invoke the Bruton rule. Accordingly, I cannot join that opinion, which looks at a record which is totally silent on the reasons for not invoking Bruton, and assumes that counsel did not intend a waiver.
The general rule is that a point is waived by failure to assert it. The Bruton objection to this evidence was never asserted at trial. In my reading of the authorities, I find it a hard task to decide whether a Bruton violation may be waived by counsel or only by defendant himself. Further assuming that counsel may waive it, the issue whether it must be waived by choice or may be waived merely by inadvertence is itself quite complex. In my view the per curiam assumes too much. Apparently, it assumes that this right may not be waived merely by counsel’s inadvertence; then it assumes that in this case, though the record is silent, a quick reading of counsel’s mind indicates that there was nothing there but blank *468inadvertence; and it then concludes that no waiver has occurred. This treatment simply sweeps too many issues under the rug for me.
When a habeas record as it stands is insufficient to provide a basis for deciding the factual question of waiver vel non, an evidentiary hearing is usually held. See, e. g., Bell v. Hopper, 237 Ga. 810 (229 SE2d 658) (1976) (Jordan, J., writing for a unanimous court).
The point has greater impact than just this petitioner’s fate, because I fear that the per curiam will invite counsel in the future to create records as silent and ambiguous as possible, to take advantage of the per curiam’s suggestion that hereafter on a silent record containing a possible foul-up on counsel’s part, we will presume that a constitutional violation occurred.