Court Opinion

ID: 9667973
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:59:27.491983+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:42.073177
License: Public Domain

LIMBAUGH, Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I respectfully dissent from that portion of the opinion pertaining to defendant’s post-conviction relief motion. In particular, I object to the conclusion that the trial court’s inquiries, made during the Rule 29.07(b)(4) hearing, were “too broad to elicit responses that refute conclusively the specific allegation of ineffective assistance of counsel presented in [defendant’s] Rule 29.15 motion.” Moreover, there is no justification for overruling the well-founded line of cases that hold to the contrary.
The questions asked at the Rule 29.07 hearing, to recapitulate, were as follows:
Q: At this time I want to ask you if you have any complaints against your attorney, the Public Defender’s Office in this case?
A: No, sir.
Q: You think they did you a good job?
A: Yes, I do.
Q: Did they do anything that you didn’t want them to do?
A: No.
Q: Did they do everything you wanted them to do?
A: Yes, sir.
Each of the points raised in defendant’s Rule 29.15 motion, including the allegation regarding the failure to introduce medical evidence to explain defendant’s post-accident behavior, consists of a complaint that the attorneys did not do everything asked of them. In response to the Rule 29.07 questions, defendant indicated unequivocally that she had no complaints against her attorneys and that the attorneys did everything that she wanted them to do. How then can it be said that the Rule 29.15 claims were not refuted by the record? The majority’s conclusion defies reason.
Furthermore, the trial court’s questions, although not “specific enough” for the majority, are the logical threshold questions that should be asked in every Rule 29.07 hearing. In my view, defendant’s responses to these questions obviated the need for further inquiry. It is only if the defendant had given the opposite answers to the questions — ‘Tes” [I have complaints against my attorney], “No” [I do not think they did a good job], ‘Tes” [They did do things that I did not want them to do], and “No” [They did not do everything I wanted them to do] — that further inquiry would be necessary. Specific questions, in other words, should be required only if the defendant’s answers to the threshold questions give rise to some complaint or objection. They are necessary only for the purpose of identifying, describing, and evaluating a complaint against counsel if and when a complaint is called to the attention of the court by defendant’s answer to the court’s general threshold questions.
The majority puts trial judges in the difficult, if not impossible, position of fashioning and propounding what will necessarily be an endless list of “specific enough” questions. Indeed, to satisfy the majority, trial judges must anticipate and perceive every possible claim of ineffective assistance of counsel and ask a specific question about each of those claims. Placing this burden on trial judges is patently unreasonable.
To be sure, the better practice of the trial court would have been to ask a variety of other questions, such as:
Did your lawyers investigate the case to your satisfaction?;
Did your lawyers talk to the witnesses that you told them about?;
Did your lawyers answer the questions you asked of them?
Even these questions, however, became unnecessary when the defendant answered without qualification that she had no complaint about her lawyers and the lawyers did everything asked of them.
For these reasons, I dissent from the judgment of this Court reversing and remanding the judgment of the motion court. I concur in the judgment of this Court affirming the judgment of the trial court on the direct appeal.