Honie v. Powell, No. 19-4158 (10th Cir. 2023)
Annotate this CasePetitioner-appellant Taberon Honie confessed to murder. About two weeks before trial, following his lawyer’s advice, Honie waived his Utah statutory right to jury sentencing in favor of sentencing by the trial judge. Years later, Honie sought habeas relief, arguing: (1) soon after he waived jury sentencing, a fellow inmate told him that he had made a mistake in doing so; (2) a week before trial, Honie asked his trial counsel to withdraw the waiver; and (3) that counsel told him it was too late. During the defense’s opening statement at the murder trial, Honie’s counsel conceded that Honie was guilty of the aggravated-murder charge, telling the jury that the case would be about punishment. After hearing the evidence, a Utah state jury convicted him of aggravated murder. The trial judge imposed the death sentence. The Utah Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence. In seeking state postconviction relief, Honie argued under the Sixth Amendment that his trial counsel performed deficiently in two ways: (1) by inadequately explaining his right to jury sentencing, and (2) by not following his direction to retract his waiver. The Utah Supreme Court rejected Honie’s first claim, concluding that Honie’s counsel had performed competently. On the second, the court didn’t rule on the deficient-performance question. For both claims, the court ruled that Honie had suffered no prejudice. Before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, Honie argued the Utah Supreme Court's application of the substantive-outcome test for prejudice announced in Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984) was unreasonable. Honie argued the holdings of three more-recent Supreme Court cases required the Utah Supreme Court to instead use the process-based test as done in Hill v. Lockhart, 474 U.S. 52 (1985). If Hill’s standard applied, Honie would have instead needed to show a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s errors, he would have chosen jury sentencing. The Tenth Circuit denied relief, finding: (1) the Supreme Court never applied Strickland’s general prejudice standard in a case involving a waiver of jury sentencing in a capital case; and (2) the Supreme Court has never held that a process-based prejudice test applied to jury-sentencing waivers.
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