Prowell v. State

• Decision Date: 11 January 2001
• Docket Number: No. 82S00-9803-PD-138.,82S00-9803-PD-138.
• Citation: 741 N.E.2d 704
• Parties: Vincent J. PROWELL, Appellant (Defendant Below), v. STATE of Indiana, Appellee (Plaintiff Below).
• Court: Indiana Supreme Court

741 N.E.2d 704

Vincent J. PROWELL, Appellant (Defendant Below), v. STATE of Indiana, Appellee (Plaintiff Below).

No. 82S00-9803-PD-138.

Supreme Court of Indiana.

January 11, 2001.

Susan K. Carpenter, Public Defender of Indiana, Barbara S. Blackman, Laura L. Volk, Steven H. Schutte, Deputy Public Defenders, Attorneys for Appellant.

Karen Freeman-Wilson, Attorney General of Indiana, Thomas D. Perkins, Deputy Attorney General, Indianapolis, Indiana, Attorneys for Appellee.

ON PETITION FOR POSTCONVICTION RELIEF

BOEHM, Justice.

Vincent Prowell pleaded guilty to the 1993 murders of Denise Powers and Chris Fillbright and was sentenced to death. Prowell appeals the denial of his petition for postconviction relief and raises seven issues, which we restate as three: (1) Prowell was not afforded full and fair postconviction proceedings; (2) trial counsel was ineffective; and (3) Prowell's death sentence is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the constitutions of Indiana and the United States.

We conclude that Prowell received ineffective assistance of counsel at both the guilt and penalty phases and that the postconviction court's findings to the contrary are clearly erroneous. We therefore reverse the denial of postconviction relief and remand with instructions to vacate Prowell's guilty plea, rescind his death sentence, and order a new trial.

Factual and Procedural Background

In November 1992, twenty-eight-year-old Vincent Prowell moved from Chicago to Evansville to live with his mother, Karen Johnson, and her boyfriend, Ed Cooper. Although Prowell had never seen or been treated by a mental health professional, those who spent time with him suspected that something was "seriously wrong" with Prowell. A number of people heard Prowell engage in conversations with himself while alone in his bedroom, talk to the television set when it was turned off, respond to questions with odd or indirect answers, drift off on incomprehensible conversational tangents, and appear fearful of and threatened by others.¹ In April 1993, Johnson and Cooper were arrested on drug charges, convicted, and sentenced to prison terms. Prowell, who was unusually dependent on his mother and had never before lived alone, moved into an apartment that Cooper had rented for him. Prowell's next door neighbor in the apartment complex was Powers.

On May 23, 1993, Powers sat in her automobile waiting for Fillbright. As Fillbright approached the driver's side door, Prowell shot him at close range in the back of the head. Prowell then shot Powers twice through the car window, piercing her lung and heart. An eyewitness identified Prowell as the shooter. Prowell v. State, 687 N.E.2d 563, 564 (Ind.1997)

A few hours later, Prowell was apprehended by police in Benton County, Indiana and confessed to both murders. Prowell also claimed that earlier that evening he had run into Fillbright, whom he had never met before, near the apartment complex's mailboxes. He told police that Fillbright had been hostile towards him for no reason, "acting all kinds of crazy" towards Prowell, with a "military look in his eye," and slinging racial slurs and "insinuation." In his confession, Prowell told police that he felt "threatened" by Fillbright and responded by getting his gun from his apartment and confronting Fillbright in the parking lot. Neighbor Joann Rose testified that Prowell approached Fillbright, shot him once from behind without any exchange of words, and then "pivoted" around to shoot twice through the passenger window.

One week after the murders, salaried, part-time public defenders Dennis Vowels and Michael Danks were appointed to represent Prowell, and a few weeks later, the State filed notice of its intent to seek the death penalty. In mid-July 1993, trial was set for January 31, 1994, with jury selection to begin on January 27. On December 22, 1993, six weeks before the trial was scheduled to begin, Vowels attempted to obtain a plea bargain in exchange for two consecutive sixty-year terms. The prosecutor refused the offer. On January 14, 1994, Prowell pleaded guilty, without a plea agreement, to the murders of Powers and Fillbright. The court accepted the plea and set sentencing for March 3, 1994.

A week after the plea hearing, Vowels for the first time hired mitigation investigator Steve Brock. On the recommendation of Brock and Paula Sites of the Indiana Public Defender Council, Vowels asked for a continuance on February 22, 1994, to permit Brock to conduct a mitigation investigation. The court postponed sentencing for six weeks to April 20, 1994. On March 30, 1994, a full five weeks after obtaining the continuance, Vowels met for the first time with psychologist Dr. Joel Dill and asked him to evaluate Prowell.

At the sentencing hearing, Dill testified that Prowell suffered from paranoid personality disorder, a relatively minor mental disorder in comparison to more severe forms of paranoia.² Several family members and the jail chaplain also testified on Prowell's behalf. The trial court found that Prowell did not commit the murders under extreme mental disease or defect and sentenced him to death. The court stated that it:

has been at a loss to find even a hint of a reason as to why the Defendant would commit what is no less than a double assassination or execution. The explanation given in one of Defendant's statements indicates racial slurs were made by Mr. Filbright to the Defendant. I have trouble with this explanation for two reasons. One, words no matter how hateful do not justify murder, and two, evidence adduced at the Sentencing Hearing showed through pictures that Mr. Filbright was serving as an Army Officer in Operation Desert Storm, and had many Afro-American friends in the Service. Another statement revealed that the Defendant believed that Mr. Filbright was about to pull a gun. I do not believe this, as Mr. Filbright was shot in the back of the head execution style at close range. The Defendant also stated he believed Ms. Powers was attempting to pull something from her purse. All the physical evidence shows that Ms. Powers was shot in the back of the head, in the side of her face as she was attempting to get out of her car. The Defendant's explanation for shooting Ms. Powers is just not believable. There is no explanation for these atrocious and senseless acts. If we could discern a motive, maybe we could all better accept these tragedies.

On direct appeal, this Court affirmed the trial court's judgment and the imposition of the death sentence. Prowell, 687 N.E.2d at 570.

In postconviction proceedings, Prowell contended that his Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel was violated. His principal contention was that his guilty plea was entered before counsel had taken a number of essential steps to establish that, although Prowell undisputedly killed the two victims, the death penalty was inappropriate in view of Prowell's demonstrably severely impaired mental health. The postconviction court denied relief and this appeal ensued.

Standard and Extent of Review

Prowell bore the burden of establishing the grounds for relief by a preponderance of the evidence. Ind. Post-Conviction Rule 1(5). Because he is now appealing from a negative judgment, to the extent his appeal turns on factual issues, Prowell must convince this Court that the evidence as a whole leads unerringly and unmistakably to a decision opposite that reached by the postconviction court. Harrison v. State, 707 N.E.2d 767, 773 (Ind. 1999) (citing Spranger v. State, 650 N.E.2d 1117, 1119 (Ind.1995)). We will reverse only upon a showing of "clear error"—that which leaves us with a definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been made. Spranger, 650 N.E.2d at 1119.

I. The Postconviction Court Findings

Prowell contends that a number of factual findings by the postconviction court were clearly erroneous. He notes that the "Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Judgment on Petition for Post-Conviction Relief" issued by the postconviction court on July 7, 1999, are a virtually verbatim copy of the findings proposed by the State on June 21, 1999.³ The conclusions of law were also as the State proposed, except for the deletion of a conclusion that Prowell had waived various claims by failing to raise the issues on direct appeal. That conclusion was incorrect in light of the then-recent decision in Woods v. State, 701 N.E.2d 1208, 1210 (Ind.1998) (holding that a Sixth Amendment claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel may be presented for the first time in a petition for postconviction relief).

It is not uncommon for a trial court to enter findings that are verbatim reproductions of submissions by the prevailing party. The trial courts of this state are faced with an enormous volume of cases and few have the law clerks and other resources that would be available in a more perfect world to help craft more elegant trial court findings and legal reasoning. We recognize that the need to keep the docket moving is properly a high priority of our trial bench. For this reason, we do not prohibit the practice of adopting a party's proposed findings. But when this occurs, there is an inevitable erosion of the confidence of an appellate court that the findings reflect the considered judgment of the trial court. This is particularly true when the issues in the case turn less on the credibility of witnesses than on the inferences to be drawn from the facts and the legal effect of essentially unchallenged testimony. For the reasons explained below, most of the statements in the findings of fact and conclusions of law are correct if viewed in isolation, but many are presented out of context and, as a result, are significantly misleading. We find some of the critical findings of the postconviction court to be clearly erroneous as that term is used in Trial Rule 52(A).

A. The Postconviction Testimony

In preparation for the postconviction relief hearing,...