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Trust the lawyers?

Last week's decision in Lee v Weber  reminded me of an old disagreement with a friend about the right to counsel on botched habeas claims. This is a highly technical area of post-conviction criminal procedure. I've always disliked procedure opinions because they sometimes miss the big picture. I've always felt that the only procedural question should be, "What can be done to make the procedure clearer?" We don't get straightforward rules of procedure from a bunch of precedents because we end up spending all our time reading cases and using them somewhat out of context. I digress. In this case, the defendant, David Lee was convicted of Second Degree Murder and sentenced to life . He'd been drinking homemade hooch and killed his cellmate. As I've touched on in prior posts, the difference between first and second-degree murder in South Dakota has to do with whether the killing was premeditated, and the penalty leaves room for parole. Over the years, I...
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A case of mistaken identity

Today, the Eighth Circuit decided another mistaken identity case. A number of times during my career, I litigated cases involving investigatory stops where the reason for the stop was based on a mistaken belief, including a mistaken identity case where a guy got stopped for an outstanding warrant against his twin brother. That makes sense. But in US v. Lemons , it's not such a close call. Investigators in Dubuque surveilled a residence where a guy with an active warrant was thought to be. The guy had led police on a high speed chase, crashed, then later escaped from the hospital. The description was that he was stocky, six feet tall, Black, and had a full head of hair with a wraparound beard. The defendant was a short, stocky, Black guy with a full head of hair and a goatee. The Eighth Circuit said that the mistaken identity question doesn't really matter because the stop was justified by the "totality of the circumstances" test. They mentioned several factors which s...
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SD Supreme Court upholds teenager sentenced to 40 years

The SD Supreme Court rejected Mr. Ronald Black Cloud's appeal from his forty year sentence for second degree murder in STATE v. BLACK CLOUD, 2023 S.D. 53. The shooting took place after an altercation outside the victim's residence in Rapid City on August 17, 2018. In South Dakota, second degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence. However, mandatory life sentences for juvenile offenders who are tried as adults was ruled unconstitutional since 2012, and the defendant was only 14 at the time. Another teenager involved in the killing agreed to plead guilty to a similar charge and was sentenced to twenty years. The primary issues on appeal were whether or not the sentence was too harsh under the circumstances and whether Judge Brown should have declared a mistrial due to certain statements from the lawyers. The case was argued by the SD attorney generals office and the Pennington County Public Defender. Mr. Black Cloud will be eligible for parole when he is 34 years old. This ...
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