 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to DUI Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
People v. McMillin9/1/2004
all witnesses to verify their client's testimony. Those lawyers would not stand for a prosecutor telling jurors that witnesses would have to commit perjury to corroborate their client's testimony.
*345 Reasonably effective criminal defense attorneys would halt prosecutorial efforts to make up evidence and to corroborate their key witnesses with prior consistent statements contained in police reports. They would object to cross-examination about their client's criminal past and would further object to the introduction of a criminal conviction that does not exist.
Which brings us to the strategic decision to elicit all the defendant's prior criminality with defense counsel's advance admonition to jurors that the defendant's prior crimes were "relevant" and "important" to the jury's decisionmaking.
The State argues:
"Defense counsel's case rested on the credibility of the defendant. In order to lend some credibility to the defendant's otherwise incredible defense and testimony, counsel chose to present evidence that whenever the defendant had been convicted before, he had always pled guilty. Defense counsel chose to bring out the peculiarities of the defendant's prior criminal history in order to bolster the defendant's credibility[ ] and to arouse the passions of the jury against the prosecutor, hoping for jury nullification."
The State correctly deciphers defense counsel's strategy. Defense counsel argued to the jury:
"He [ (the prosecutor) ] can make whoop-dee-doo about his past convictions, but look what Mr. McMillan [sic ] has had to display to all of you[--]that he's got a decade of criminal activity being a DUI [sic ]. He's very straight [ ] forward, put that out on the record, told you about a sentence of imprisonment for driving revoked that he had and they sought up to three years, if that meant anything. What's that history of Mr. McMillan's [sic ] criminal past tell us? He's got a felony, that's fine. It also tells us up until these charges he has always pled guilty. He has always come before the bar and taken responsibility for what he's done. * * * He's always not gone through the expense of a jury trial and pled guilty to the charges that he faced. But this time is different. He wasn't driving a vehicle."
The State also recognizes an additional component of this strategy. Defense counsel emphasized that the same prosecutor, the one trying the charges leveled here, successfully prosecuted all the defendant's other crimes. As the State correctly points out, defense counsel implied that this prosecution was a part of a decade-long vendetta that the prosecutor had waged against the defendant. However, this component of the strategy fell apart because the public record simply does not support it. Defense counsel apparently did not check public records to learn that this prosecutor was not the same prosecutor who had successfully prosecuted the defendant during his "decade of criminality." *346 Had it been accurate that one man had prosecuted the defendant throughout the decade, it could hardly be said to have constituted a vendetta when the defendant admitted that he had committed all the crimes for which he had been prosecuted and had willingly pled guilty and accepted his punishment.
It is important to note that this is not a case where defense counsel's pretrial efforts to prevent prior convictions from being used for impeachment failed. Nor is it **19 ***508 a case where the State was going to be permitted to prove other prior criminality for some purpose other than the accused's propensity for criminal behavior. In those instances, reasonably effective criminal defense lawyers might try to soften such evidence's impact by eliciting it themselves with the "owning up" spin that a guilty plea would allow.
He
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Illinois DUI Attorneys
DUI Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to DUI Lawyers in your area.
|
|