Elmore v. Ozmint, No. 07-14 (4th Cir. 2011)
Annotate this CaseDefendant, a mentally retarded handyman, was in prison for nearly thirty years for the murder of an elderly woman who had sporadically employed him. The 28 U.S.C. 2254 petition on appeal was part of defendant's very first effort to secure federal habeas corpus relief. The federal habeas proceedings were prolonged in part because of the court's stay of the appeal to await further state court action. Having scrutinized volumes of records of defendant's three trials and his state PCR proceedings, the court recognized that there were grave questions about whether it really was defendant who committed the murder. The court held that defendant was entitled to habeas corpus relief on his Sixth Amendment claim of ineffective assistance of counsel premised on his trial lawyers' blind acceptance of the State's forensic evidence. Accordingly, the court reversed the district court's judgment denying relief and remanded for the court to award the writ unless the State of South Carolina endeavored to prosecute defendant in a new trial within a reasonable time.
The court issued a subsequent related opinion or order on December 12, 2012.
Some case metadata and case summaries were written with the help of AI, which can produce inaccuracies. You should read the full case before relying on it for legal research purposes.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.