By: Derek Hawkins//September 6, 2016//
7th Circuit Court of Appeals
Case Name: Charles Walker v. Kathy Griffin
Case No.: 15-2147
Officials: WOOD, Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK and KANNE, Circuit Judges.
Focus: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel
Attorney failure to challenge habitual-offender conviction did rise to ineffective assistance
Charles Walker was convicted in an Indiana court of robbery, adjudicated a habitual offender pursuant to Indiana Code § 35-50-2-8, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Twenty of those years were attributable to his habitual-offender status. The version of the habitual-offender statute Indiana had in place at the time applied if a defendant had been convicted of two prior unrelated felonies, in a specific sequence: the second felony had to have been committed after the commission of and sentencing for the first, and the present crime had to have been committed after the commission and sentencing of the second earlier offense. At Walker’s trial, the state provided evidence of three prior felonies, but it failed to offer evidence of the date when one of the crimes was committed. The only claim Walker presses before us is ineffective assistance of appellate counsel. He contends that his lawyer on direct appeal should have challenged the sufficiency of the evidence for the habitual-offender conviction, given the missing date. Even assuming that counsel’s performance fell below the constitutional minimum, we conclude that Walker’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus was properly dismissed. The state appellate court’s conclusion that Walker’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel was not infringed meets the generous standards that apply under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, and so we affirm.
Affirmed