Stitts v. Wilson, No. 12-2255 (7th Cir. 2013)
Annotate this CaseStitts was convicted of murder in Indiana state court and sentenced to 60 years’ imprisonment. The district court denied his petition for habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. 2254. Stitts claimed that his trial counsel was ineffective under Strickland v. Washington, because, before deciding not to present an alibi defense, he only interviewed one alibi witness, Stitts’s father, unreasonably failing to investigate whether there might be more. The state court found that such a limited investigation was sufficient under Strickland. The Seventh Circuit reversed and remanded to state court for a factual determination of the amount of investigation actually conducted. Stitts’s alibi was that he was at a nightclub, where there could be any number of potential alibi witnesses, so failure to explore that possibility would be unreasonable. The state court unreasonably applied Strickland when it found no prejudice, because the prosecution’s case rested entirely on the shaky testimony of two witnesses which could have been neutralized by alibi witness testimony.
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