Court Opinion

ID: 9463656
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:12:34.158326+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:13.062062
License: Public Domain

DUNIWAY, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
I concur under the compulsion of our decision in Sanders v. Craven, 9 Cir., 1973, 488 F.2d 478. I suggest, however, that we are getting ourselves on a semantic merry-go-round, with little prospect of real benefit to the law.
*1167I suggest that there are two different kinds of “inadequate assistance of counsel” cages. One is the case in which the defendant has no lawyer at all (I classify Powell v. Alabama, 1932, 287 U.S. 45, 53 S.Ct. 55, 77 L.Ed. 158, as such a case, even though the court did purport to appoint all the members of the bar to represent the defendants; in fact, no lawyer really represented them), or in which counsel’s performance is so bad or inept as to amount to no representation at all. The other is a case in which there has been .a lawyer, he has handled the trial, he has done most of it pretty well, but it is claimed that in certain respects his representation was ineffective. The latter is the kind of case that we have here.
The language of our decision in Sanders v. Craven, supra, requires that in such a ease the habeas corpus court must decide whether there has been “an impermissible deprivation of Sixth Amendment rights,” i. e., ineffective assistance of counsel, rather than deciding whether, assuming that counsel’s assistance was partly ineffective, the resulting error was harmless. Yet in United States v. Bradford, 9 Cir., 1975, 528 F.2d 899, which is not cited in Judge East’s opinion, we said:
The rule is that a conviction will not be reversed for inadequacy of counsel unless counsel failed to render reasonably effective assistance, resulting in a denial of fundamental fairness. Smith v. United States, 446 F.2d 1117,1119 (9th Cir. 1971). Bradford’s counsel was an able and experienced lawyer. He did the best he could with a virtually impossible case. At worst counsel’s actions were only tactical decisions which in retrospect might have been wrong. See United States v. Ortiz, 488 F.2d 175 (9th Cir. 1973); United States v. Stern, 519 F.2d 521 (9th Cir. 1975). (Id. at 900.)
If that is not a different way of stating a harmless error rule, what is it?
I suggest that while Judge Peckham did not use the language of Bradford, what he did comes very close to what Bradford says that he should have done, namely, decide whether there was a denial of fundamental fairness. Cooper claimed that there were three respects in which his counsel was inadequate. The first is that counsel did not make a motion to suppress certain evidence. Judge Peckham considered whether failure to grant a motion to suppress, if it were made, would be harmless under the Chapman rule, and he held that it would be harmless. Under the Bradford standard one could say, on the same facts, that it was arguable whether the motion would have been good, that the decision whether to move is for counsel to make, and that his failure to make the motion does not amount to inadequate representation, especially because use of the evidence in question was harmless under Chapman.
Cooper’s second claim is that counsel should have admitted Cooper’s prior convictions and that his failure to do so allowed the district attorney to introduce evidence about them which might otherwise have been excluded. Judge Peckham said that this did not rise to the level of making the trial a sham or a mockery of justice, or to a failure to assert a crucial defense. The last phrase comes close to Bradford’s “denial of fundamental fairness” language.
Cooper’s third claim was that counsel did not tell Cooper about his right to appeal. Judge Peckham found as a fact that Cooper knew about his right to appeal and that therefore, under our decisions, it was not an obligation of counsel to tell him. That again is close to the Bradford standard.
To require Judge Peckham to hold another hearing is to require a waste of judicial time. I can find no good reason why we should make him go through that exercise. Wére it not for Sanders, I would dissent.