Court Opinion

ID: 9450009
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:32:45.252441+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:06.941565
License: Public Domain

J. SPENCER BELL, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) :
I dissent from what I consider a niggardly denial of the Great Writ. Respectfully, I deplore the statement by the majority that a trial must be reduced to a farce before an indigent’s rights to adequate counsel will be recognized. I protest also against so excessively literal a reading of this pro se petition as to hold that it did not raise incompetence of counsel and that this was not the issue before the state court. In explanation of his conduct of the trial, counsel stated that he did not remember whether or not Tompa gave the list of witnesses but that he would not have interviewed them because they were convicted criminals, and he further added that his strategy was not to dignify the state’s makeweight charge of armed robbery by offering evidence to disprove it! I think this explanation comes close to disclosing the farce which the cited rule demands.
I think the pro se state court petition adequately raised the issue of incompetence of counsel when read with the latitude required by Price v. Johnston, 334 U.S. 266, 68 S.Ct. 1049, 92 L.Ed. 1356 (1948).1
Tune v. Cunningham, 319 F.2d 823 (4 Cir. 1963), is not authority here. Tompa’s state court petition spoke in general terms of “no preparation” and “witnesses * * * without * * * any opportunity to give testimony for him.” This language clearly raised the issue of incompetence of counsel because of lack of preparation. The allegations with respect to the one witness Mum-power raised the same issue in a specific context. This is very different from an allegation of total absence of counsel where incompetence was the real issue. “Where the layman’s papers clearly show what he is driving at, it is usually in the interest of justice and may in the long run save time to temper the reading of the papers with a measure of tolerance.” United States v. Glass, 317 F.2d 200, 202 (4 Cir. 1963). Cf. Roberts v. Pegelow, 313 F.2d 548 (4 Cir. 1963).
Nothing is to be gained either for efficiency of the judicial process or for the “delicate balance of state-federal relations” in the practice of sending such petitions back through the legal maze in order to get an on-the-merit ruling on a point that was obvious from the very beginning — nothing except perhaps that *557the petitioners will, in sheer exhaustion and frustration, submit to the injustice. I think the petitioner had exhausted his state remedies and was entitled to a federal hearing on the issue of incompetent counsel.

. “It was enough if [the prisoner] presented an allegation and supporting facts which, if borne out by proof, would entitle him to relief. Prisoners are often unlearned in the law and unfamiliar with the complicated rules of pleading. Since they act so often as their own counsel in habeas corpus proceedings, we cannot impose on them the same high standards of the legal art which we might place on the members of the legal profession. Especially is this true in a case like this where the imposition of those standards would have a retroactive and prejudicial effect on the prisoner’s in-artistically drawn petition. Cf. Holiday v. Johnston, 313 U.S. 342, 350 [61 S.Ct. 1015, 1017, 85 L.Ed. 1392]; Pyle v. Kansas, supra [317 U.S. [213] at page 216] [63 S.Ct. [177], at page 178, 87 L.Ed. 214]; Tomkins v. Missouri, 323 U.S. 485, 487 [65 S.Ct. 370, 371, 89 L.Ed. 407]; Rice v. Olson, 324 U.S. 786, 791, 792 [65 S.Ct. 989, 992, 89 L.Ed. 1367].” 334 U.S. at 292, 68 S.Ct. at 1063, 92 L.Ed. 1356.