Ineffective assistance of counsel; Failure to make a request for a warn & dismiss resolution

The court affirmed the trial court’s dispositional order referring respondent-juvenile to in-home probation. He was adjudicated after pleading guilty to CCW and “breaking and entering into a motor vehicle to steal property less than $200[.]” Respondent argued “that his trial counsel provided constitutionally deficient assistance when he failed to request that the trial court give [him] a warning and dismiss the case.” He contended “that his trial counsel was ineffective for failing ‘to make a request for a warn and dismiss resolution.”’ Unfortunately, he wholly failed “to explain why it was objectively unreasonable for his trial counsel to not make this request. By the time counsel could have made this request, respondent had already pleaded guilty, and his sentence was up to the trial court. While respondent’s trial counsel certainly could have requested a lighter punishment, decisions like that are quintessential matters of trial strategy, and ‘[w]e will not substitute our judgment for that of counsel on matters of trial strategy, nor will we use the benefit of hindsight when assessing counsel’s competence.’” Regardless, his argument also ignored “the fact that his trial counsel did request a lesser punishment than was imposed. Respondent’s trial counsel requested that respondent not be ordered to wear a tether, but the trial court apparently disagreed that a lesser punishment was appropriate because it placed respondent on probation with a tether.” This alone demonstrated that, even if his “trial counsel had requested ‘a warn and dismiss resolution,’ there was not a reasonable probability that his sentence would have been different.”