Henry v. State
| Decision Date | 12 October 2006 |
| Docket Number | No. SC04-153.,SC04-153. |
| Citation | 948 So.2d 609 |
| Parties | John Ruthell HENRY, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee. |
| Court | Florida Supreme Court |
John Ruthell Henry, a prisoner under sentence of death for the murder of his five-year-old stepson, Eugene Christian ("Eugene"), appeals the denial of his motion for postconviction relief filed pursuant to Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure 3.850 and 3.851. We have jurisdiction. See art. V, § 3(b)(1), Fla. Const. Applying the two-prong test from Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687-96, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984), we determine that Henry has failed to establish either that his counsel's performance was deficient or that the deficient performance prejudiced the defense. In doing so, we recognize that defense counsel's strategy entailed significant risk to the defendant and should be employed with caution and only after careful analysis. Nevertheless, we cannot find that this strategy fell below the "wide range of professionally competent assistance" when evaluated from counsel's perspective at the time defense counsel suggested and Henry agreed to this strategy. See id. at 689-90, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Furthermore, Henry has not shown that "there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's [allegedly] unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different." Id. at 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052; see also Hodges v. State, 885 So.2d 338, 345-46 (Fla.2004).
Eugene's death originated from a dispute that occurred on December 22, 1985, in Pasco County, between John Ruthhell Henry ("Henry") and his estranged wife, Suzanne Henry ("Suzanne"). It ended when Henry, by his own admission, "freaked out," stabbed Suzanne thirteen times in the neck, and covered her body with a rug. According to Henry, he then picked up her son, Eugene, who was watching television in another room, and drove the child to Plant City in Hillsborough County. The two stopped a number of times to purchase beer and cocaine for Henry and a snack for the child. Henry smoked some of the cocaine as he drove. On the way back to Pasco County, Henry thought he saw flashing lights in the background. He pulled over into an isolated area where the car got stuck in the mud. Henry and Eugene walked a short distance. Henry stopped to smoke more cocaine, took Eugene on his knee, and stabbed the boy to death.
Two days later, Henry led the police to Eugene's body. The police had arrested Henry in connection with Suzanne's murder. After reading Henry his Miranda1 rights, Detective Fay Wilber questioned Henry about Eugene's whereabouts. At one point in the interview, Detective Wilber stood up and said that he was going to leave and find the boy without Henry's help. After this, Henry confessed. He told Detective Wilber that Eugene was in Plant City, that the boy was not alive, and that he would lead the police to the crime scene. At the crime scene, the police discovered the five-year-old's body with five stab wounds in the neck. Henry recounted the details of what happened on December 22 to the police and confessed to murdering both Suzanne and Eugene.2
On November 15, 1987, Henry was sentenced to death in Hillsborough County for killing Eugene,3 but this Court reversed the conviction on direct appeal and required that Henry be given a new trial. Henry v. State, 574 So.2d 66, 71-73 (Fla. 1991).4 In August 1992, he received this new trial and was again convicted.5 The jury recommended death by a vote of eleven to one. The trial judge agreed that death was the appropriate penalty. Finding that the two aggravating factors outweighed the two statutory and six nonstatutory mitigating factors, the court sentenced Henry to death.6 This Court affirmed the judgment and sentence on direct appeal. Henry v. State, 649 So.2d 1361 (Fla.1994).7
On September 12, 2002, Henry filed a "Complete Post Conviction Motion to Vacate Judgment and Death Sentence" pursuant to Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.850. Following a Huff8 hearing, the trial court ordered an evidentiary hearing on three of Henry's ineffective assistance of counsel claims. The evidentiary hearing occurred on October 17, 2003, and on December 17, 2003, the trial court entered an order denying relief. The trial court found that Henry failed to meet either prong of the Strickland test.
The first claim asserted that defense counsel failed to adequately investigate the defense of insanity. Henry voluntarily waived this defense at the evidentiary hearing.
The second claim was that defense counsel failed to adequately investigate the defense of voluntary intoxication. The trial court recognized that Henry's counsel presented three experts and two lay witnesses at trial who testified that Henry lacked the specific intent to commit this crime. Moreover, at the evidentiary hearing, Henry provided no other witnesses that could have testified. As determined by the trial court, "just because Dr. Mosman [i.e., the expert whom Henry's appellate counsel asked to testify at the evidentiary hearing] or any other individual, with the benefit of hindsight would have proceeded with the experts differently, does not entitle Defendant to post conviction relief." Henry did not contest the trial court's finding in his appeal to this Court.
Henry's third claim was that his counsel was ineffective for leading him to testify that he (1) had earlier been convicted of stabbing Patricia Roddy; (2) had served only half his sentence for this crime; and (3) had been given the death penalty for Suzanne's murder. In denying this claim, the trial court found that defense counsel "made a tactical, strategic decision, with the joint consent of both co-counsel, Mr. Wells, and the Defendant to disclose the Roddy murder to the jury during the guilt phase." It also found that the decision to disclose Henry's sentence for the Roddy murder and his death sentence for Suzanne's murder were "tactical, strategic decisions." Moreover, it recognized that the decisions were made by the lead defense counsel, who had significant trial court experience.9
At the evidentiary hearing, Henry's lead defense counsel, William Fuente, testified to the dire situation facing defense counsel as they approached Henry's second trial for Eugene's murder and the fourth trial for the events surrounding Eugene's death:
[F]rom our perspective it was a very difficult case. First of all, [Henry] had been convicted once before. Secondly ... the underlying facts were that he had confessed to the authorities to the offense, that so that was difficult.... And beyond that ... there was a lot of other evidence beyond this confession that implicated him in the offense.
Defense counsel also testified that its trial strategy was to disclose everything:
Well, the decision to proceed the way we did, and this is let Mr. Henry testify and acknowledging everything, was arrived at ... within a couple of months of the trial commencing. And my recollection of this we had a—we had a meeting, Mr. Henry, Mr. Wells [defense co-counsel] and myself ... just throwing the idea around. At the time, the thinking was that [Henry] had already been convicted once of his offense ... and then again in [Pasco] County of a homicide that occurred previously, and based upon our assessment of the evidence the state had against him, it was highly unlikely we were going to achieve an acquittal. So our best hope—our thought was our best hope was to try to achieve, number 1, a conviction on a lesser on some defense where we could get into the—his mental history, and the only way that could happen was we would agree with an insanity or a voluntary intoxication defense, and we chose the latter. We excluded considering the insanity defense because of the, really the flip-flopping of one or two of the doctors.
....
And the other concern was that after discussing with Mr. Henry my having been in this situation before and Mr. Wells having been in this situation whereby if we approached this case on a pure not guilty, then denying the offense, if you will, it would have likely culminated in a situation where that jury would not have known, likely would not have known about ... the Pasco County murder, which happened very shortly before and the Roddy murder which happened some ten years before. So we would have been faced with a client whose jury just found him guilty and then at penalty phase for the first time that jury would have known about two other homicides. We were almost certain that would result in a recommendation of death. So our strategy, if you will, was to lay it all out on the table so that the jury would not be surprised, they would know everything there was to know and again, that was a calculated decision on all our parts.
(Emphasis added.) Moreover, defense counsel testified that this decision was specifically discussed with Henry in advance and that Henry consented to it:
I [Henry's trial counsel] have a photographic recall of one brief part of that interview and I remember myself saying ... to the other two, Mr. Henry and Mr. Wells, what do you folks think about us letting everything hang out ... and I recall we had further discussions and we certainly contemplated pros and cons ... and I remember reaching that consensus.
The issue on appeal is whether Henry's counsel was ineffective for leading Henry to testify on direct examination during the guilt phase that (1) in 1976, he had pled no contest to second-degree murder in the death of his first wife, Patricia Roddy, and had served seven and a half years of his fifteen-year sentence for that murder; (2) Patricia Roddy, like Eugene, was stabbed to death; and (3)...
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