Florida v. Nixon
Nixon was charged with first degree murder, kidnapping, robbery and arson; the state sought a capital sentence. At trial, Nixon’s attorney, Crosby, pursued a strategy of acknowledging Nixon’s guilt in both his opening and closing statements in an attempt to maintain credibility with the jury when he later argued at sentencing that respondent’s life should be spared. Nixon refused to attend most of the trial proceedings, including the days of the opening and closing statements. The jury convicted Nixon and sentenced him to death.
After the conviction and sentence were affirmed on direct appeal, Nixon moved for state postconviction relief on the theory that he had ineffective assistance of counsel at his trial. The trial court denied the motion but the Florida Supreme Court remanded the case to the trial court for an evidentiary hearing, holding that counsel would be held ineffective per se if Nixon could establish that he did not consent to his attorney’s strategy. The trial court held that even though Nixon did not provide his counsel with an explicit verbal consent to the attorney’s strategy, his knowledge of the situation was seen as implicit consent. The Florida Supreme Court reversed and remanded for a new trial, holding that the evidence showed only Nixon’s “silent acquiescence” rather than the required explicit consent.
Question Presented:
In a capital murder case, the Florida Supreme Court:
A. applied an incorrect standard, contrary to Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), Bell v. Cone, 535 U.S. 685 (2002) and Roe v. Flores-Ortega, 120 S.Ct. 1029
(2000), by finding defense counsel ineffective per se under United States v. Cronic, 466 U.S. 648 (1984) despite having found counsel's strategy not to contest overwhelming evidence of
guilt but to vigorously contest the sentence in the defendant's best interest and reasonably calculated to avoid a death sentence, and
B. erred in concluding that Boykin v. Alabama, 395 U.S. 238 (1969) prohibited trial counsel from adopting a strategy, after fully informing his client, without objection, not to contest
overwhelming evidence of guilt to protect the best interest of his client in contesting the appropriateness of imposing the death penalty.
