Court Opinion

ID: 9709194
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 03:42:31.876106+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:46.891707
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE WHITE, dissenting: I would reverse defendant’s conviction because he was denied the effective assistance of counsel due to counsel’s failure to raise insanity as a defense. Everything about this case raises serious doubts about defendant’s sanity: the senseless, brutal way he bashed and slashed his stepdaughter, Lillie, to death; defendant’s explanation of the crime given in his confession that he was thinking about relieving himself from “agony, pain” and was having “spontaneous thoughts, and Lillie was the only thing I guess I could release that frustration out on”; the statement defendant gave when, splattered with blood, he was taken by police from the body of his stepdaughter and complained that he did not want to leave his other three children alone; and the expert testimony of Alan K. Rosenwald that defendant was insane and had been so for some years. Yet, defense counsel did not raise insanity as a defense and gave this as the reason: “The defense of insanity was not asserted at trial, due to the fact that Mr. Lamerson has indicated he was not present at the time of the actual killing, and he never said he did it, to his lawyers, at any rate. So we couldn’t in fact, really put that defense in during the course of the trial, Judge.” Defense counsel was simply mistaken as to the law. As explained in People v. Ford (1968), 39 Ill. 2d 318, 321, 235 N.E.2d 576, 578, “[t]here is no reason why defendant may not deny commission of the crime and also raise the affirmative defense of insanity.” Trial lawyer’s similar mistake regarding the law was called egregious error in People v. Rainey (1986), 149 Ill. App. 3d 327, 500 N.E.2d 602; it was equally egregious here, and the failure to assert the defense of insanity left defendant virtually with no defense. The majority’s attempt to distinguish Rainey is ineffective. The majority states: “In Rainey, there was a clear statement by defense counsel that he believed that it was not possible to raise the defense at trial when defendant denied committing the offense.” (190 Ill. App. 3d at 59.) The majority ignores the fact that in the case at bar defense counsel made it equally clear that she believed she could not raise the defense of insanity because defendant claimed that he was not present at the time the murder was committed. The majority concludes that “there was no reasonable probability that but for her [the trial attorney’s] error the result would have been different.” (190 Ill. App. 3d at 59.) I disagree and therefore I dissent.