Ineffective assistance of counsel; Prior convictions; Trial strategy; People v Parker; Message on the witness’s voicemail; Detective’s statements; Factual predicates

Concluding “that none of defendant’s claims of ineffective assistance [had] merit, either individually or collectively,” the court affirmed. He was convicted of AWIGBH and felony-firearm. He raised a number of ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims, but did “not allege that he was prejudiced by any one of his trial counsel’s supposed errors—he instead argue[d] that the cumulative effect of all of his trial counsel’s errors prejudiced him.” Defendant contended that questioning his previous convictions “was objectively unreasonable because evidence about defendant’s prior convictions would not have been otherwise admissible.” The court was “inclined to agree with the prosecution that this did not amount to ineffective assistance.” The court’s “conclusion that this line of questioning can constitute legitimate trial strategy is bolstered by our Supreme Court’s opinion in” Parker. There, like in this case, “the defendant’s trial counsel asked the defendant about his past conviction on direct examination, and the defendant testified about his conviction on the stand.” On appeal, he “argued that his trial counsel’s line of questioning amounted to ineffective assistance, but our Supreme Court was not persuaded, saying, ‘While we are not inclined to recommend this strategy on retrial, we are not prepared to hold it amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel.’” The court noted that trial counsel “is given wide discretion in matters of trial strategy because many calculated risks may be necessary in order to win difficult cases,” and that “a strategy is not unreasonable ‘simply because it did not work[.]’” With these principles in mind, the court reached “the same result as our Supreme Court did in Parker—while we do not recommend defendant’s trial counsel’s strategy, we conclude that it did not amount to ineffective assistance.” Also, defendant contended that his trial counsel’s questioning of witness-D “was objectively unreasonable because it elicited testimony from” D that defendant “was drunk on the night of the shooting and left her a voicemail saying, ‘I think I’m going to jail.’” To the extent D “testified that defendant was drunk on the night of the shooting, that fact was already in evidence.” The court agreed “with the prosecution that there was likely a strategic reason for eliciting testimony that defendant was drunk at the time of the shooting.” It concluded that it was “not objectively unreasonable for defendant’s trial counsel to elicit testimony from [D] that defendant was intoxicated on the night of the shooting.” As for D’s “testimony about the voicemail that defendant left her, that testimony was clearly nonresponsive to the question that defendant’s trial counsel asked.” Further, the court held that neither of Detective M’s “statements that defendant [took] issue with amounted to comments on defendant’s credibility or guilt, and both statements were instead admissible personal perceptions that [M] made during his investigation.” Lastly, he raised a number of other ineffective-assistance claims, but he failed to establish the factual predicates of any of them.