Lecroy v. United States

• Decision Date: 15 January 2014
• Docket Number: No. 12–15132.,12–15132.
• Citation: 739 F.3d 1297
• Parties: William Emmett LeCROY, Jr., Petitioner–Appellant, v. UNITED STATES of America, Respondent–Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

739 F.3d 1297

William Emmett LeCROY, Jr., Petitioner–Appellant,

v.UNITED STATES of America, Respondent–Appellee.

No. 12–15132.

United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit.

Jan. 15, 2014.

John Richard Martin, Sandra Michaels, Martin Brothers, PC, Atlanta, GA, for Petitioner–Appellant.

William L. Mckinnon, Jr., Shanya Dingle, Lawrence R. Sommerfeld, U.S. Attorney's Office, Atlanta, GA, for Respondent–Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. D.C. Docket Nos. 2:08–cv–00083–RWS, 2:02–cr–00038–RWS–SSC–1.

Before TJOFLAT, HULL, and MARCUS, Circuit Judges.

TJOFLAT, Circuit Judge:

William Emmett LeCroy, Jr. is a federal death-row inmate. In 2004, he was convicted in the Northern District of Georgia of taking a motor vehicle by force from Joann Lee Tiesler, resulting in her death. See18 U.S.C. § 2119(3) (2010). LeCroy was sentenced to death, and this court affirmed his conviction and sentence on direct appeal. United States v. LeCroy, 441 F.3d 914 (11th Cir.2006), cert. denied550 U.S. 905, 127 S.Ct. 2096, 167 L.Ed.2d 816 (2007). LeCroy then petitioned the District Court to vacate his sentence pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2255 (2010). The court, after holding a three-day evidentiary hearing, denied his petition. United States v. LeCroy, Nos. 2:02–CR–38–RWS–SSC, 2:08–CV–2277–RWS, 2012 WL 1114238 (N.D.Ga. Mar. 30, 2012). LeCroy now appeals that ruling. His claim is that he was denied the effective assistance of counsel during the penalty phase of his trial in violation of the Sixth Amendment.¹See Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984). After reviewing the record and the parties' briefs, and after hearing oral argument, we affirm the judgment of the District Court.

I.

The basic facts of the crime for which LeCroy was convicted and sentenced have never been in dispute: on October 7, 2001, LeCroy broke into the home of Joann Tiesler, raped and murdered her, and fled in her car to the Canadian border, where he was arrested two days later. But because evaluating LeCroy's § 2255 claim requires an understanding of his life and background, we begin in Subpart A with a sketch of LeCroy's biography up to the murder, then describe the murder and his arrest. Subpart B deals with LeCroy's attorneys, their investigation of the case, and their strategic choices heading to trial. Subpart C recounts the events at trial, and Subpart D describes the § 2255 proceedings in the District Court.

A.

LeCroy was born in 1970 in Marietta, Georgia, to William Emmett LeCroy, Sr., and Donna Houston. At seventeen, shortly after his parents divorced, he joined the United States Army. Stationed in Hawaii, LeCroy went absent-without-leave and lived on the streets of Honolulu, supporting himself by breaking into homes to steal food. He was arrested in 1989 and discharged from the Army. Then nineteen years old, LeCroy moved back in with his mother—who had since married Sam Houston, a former police partner of LeCroy's father—in Cobb County, Georgia, just northwest of Atlanta.

While living with his mother and stepfather, LeCroy began a sexual relationship with one of Sam Houston's two daughters, Alecia, who was just shy of her fourteenth birthday. The family discovered the relationship in January, 1990, when Alecia's mother—Sam Houston's ex-wife—found a note written by Alecia to a friend detailing her sexual encounters with LeCroy. Alecia's mother reported the incident to the police and urged local authorities to charge LeCroy with statutory rape.

Meanwhile, the Cobb County police were investigating a string of burglaries that occurred between late 1990 and early 1991. The police identified LeCroy as a suspect and arrested him on March 3, 1991, following a traffic stop. Police found a gun in LeCroy's car along with several handwritten notes. ²

LeCroy was first convicted in state court for aggravated assault, burglary, child molestation, and statutory rape. As he was serving his sentence for those crimes, he was convicted in federal court for possession of a sawed-off shotgun, which he had obtained in one of his burglaries. He served an additional five years in federal prison for that offense. In total, he was incarcerated for just over ten years.

LeCroy was released from federal prison in August 2001 and subject to a three-year term of supervised release. He moved back in with his mother and Sam Houston, who had since relocated to Blue Ridge, Georgia, in the mountains south of the Tennessee border. LeCroy was required to undergo a psychosexual evaluation as a condition of supervised release, but LeCroy left the evaluation prematurely. His probation officer warned that if he refused the evaluation he risked being sent back to prison, so LeCroy agreed to return to complete the evaluation in late October.

Later, at trial, the Government would contend that LeCroy never intended to make good on this agreement to submit to the evaluation. LeCroy was, according to his increasingly concerned stepfather, spending time alone in his room on the computer. Investigators determined the computer was used to search for survival gear, and to scan and copy Sam Houston's passport. Investigators also found a “need to acquire” list written on the back of the letter scheduling LeCroy's original evaluation; the list included binoculars, boots, gloves, guns, ammunition, food, and water.

LeCroy's mother and stepfather went away for the weekend on October 5, leaving LeCroy alone in their cabin. That weekend there was a series of robberies in the neighborhood, including the theft of medical supplies, a shotgun, and ammunition.

On the evening of October 7, LeCroy broke into Joann Tiesler's home through a bedroom window, armed with a shotgun, a knife, and plastic cable ties. LeCroy made sure to return the open window blinds to their original position, so that from the outside Tiesler's house appeared undisturbed. Tiesler, a nurse, had been away for the weekend visiting her fiancé in Rome, Georgia. She returned home around 6:00 p.m.

As Tiesler entered her home, LeCroy approached from behind and struck her on her head with the butt of his shotgun, causing the gun to discharge in the hallway outside her bedroom. LeCroy bound Tiesler's hands behind her back with the plastic cable ties. LeCroy stripped her and raped her vaginally and anally. After that, he strangled her with an electrical cord, slashed her throat with his knife, and stabbed her five times in the back before wiping the knife off on her shirt. LeCroy left Tiesler's house and drove away in her car. A real-estate agent and one of Tiesler's coworkers discovered her body the next day, naked and bound on her bed.

LeCroy was arrested on October 9, 2001, two days after Tiesler's murder. He was captured at the border between Minnesota and Canada, still driving Tiesler's car. Inside the car, police found a knife covered in Tiesler's blood and plastic cable ties like those used to bind Tiesler's wrists. A note found in the car read, “Please call the police and report this vehicle as stolen. Thanks, The Thief.” A second note, written on the back of a map, read “Please please please forgive me Joanne [sic]. You were an angel and I killed you. Now I have to live with that and I can never go home. I am a vagabond and doomed to hell.”

B.

On May 15, 2002, a Northern District of Georgia grand jury indicted LeCroy for taking a motor vehicle by force, violence, and intimidation from Joann Tiesler, resulting in her death. See18 U.S.C. § 2119(3). A superseding indictment, dated August 13, 2002, added special death-eligibility allegations. LeCroy was appointed a team of lawyers from the Northern District of Georgia Federal Defender Program: Paul Kish, Stephanie Kearns, and Brian Mendelsohn.³ Later, a fourth attorney—Daniel Summer—was appointed as local counsel from the Gainesville area, where the trial would be held.⁴ The attorneys agreed that Kish and Summer would focus on the guilt phase of trial, while Kearns and Mendelsohn would focus on the penalty phase.

With the help of two investigators, Susan Miller and Michael Hutcheson, the defense attorneys gathered extensive records of LeCroy's background. They gathered school records, military records, records relating to LeCroy's earlier criminal convictions, prison records, and police reports relating to Tiesler's murder. The attorneys delivered all these records to Doctor Michael Hilton, a forensic psychiatrist the attorneys hired on March 27, 2003, to conduct an evaluation of LeCroy. Paul Kish testified at the § 2255 hearing that the public defender's office “quite often used [Hilton]” to conduct these sorts of evaluations. Collateral Tr. Vol. I at 14. As Paul Mendelsohn later testified, the attorneys never planned to call Doctor Hilton as a witness at trial; his evaluation was, instead, to be a “test run” so that the defense team could see what a psychiatric evaluation of LeCroy would reveal before making any final strategic judgments: “[T]he idea behind Dr. Hilton was to see what would happen, what kind of results we would get in an evaluation if we just did a straight evaluation.... [W]e were going to see what results he came back with, and then with that information in hand, proceed with the rest of the case.” Collateral Tr. Vol. II at 265.

Doctor Hilton met with LeCroy in prison for four and a half hours, and prepared a set of reports for defense counsel. One report related Doctor Hilton's conclusion that LeCroy was competent and that he could not present an affirmative defense of not guilty by reason of insanity. Another report summarized Doctor Hilton's psychiatric evaluation of LeCroy, reflecting Doctor Hilton's diagnoses and professional observations.

During the evaluation, LeCroy told Doctor Hilton about his troubled upbringing. His parents' marriage had been an unhappy one: his father—William LeCroy, Sr.—was verbally abusive toward his mother, a “loving, gentle, timid woman.” Hilton...