Appellate Lawyer of the Week: Houston Attorney Gets Life Sentence Overturned
If David Mejia had a different or better lawyer, he might have been sentenced to 20 years in prison for murder after he fatally stabbed a man in bar…
October 13, 2017 at 03:57 PM
4 minute read
If David Mejia had a different or better lawyer, he might have been sentenced to 20 years in prison for murder after he fatally stabbed a man in bar fight in Victoria, Texas. Instead he's served 19 years of a life sentence for a case in which he claimed self-defense.
While ineffective assistance of counsel is the most common claim Texas courts hear from inmates attempting to free themselves from prison, it is also the claim most often rejected by federal courts because the standard of review is so high.
Yet Houston attorney David Adler beats those extreme odds recently when he convinced U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas to overturn Mejia's murder conviction by a state court jury.
Specifically, Adler proved that Mejia's court-appointed trial counsel made critical errors when he failed to ask the jury to consider the offense of manslaughter, which carries a maximum 20 year sentence.
“In this case, the standards for ineffective assistance are pretty high,” Adler said, noting the 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Strickland v. Washington requires proof that a lawyer's performance fell below and objective standard of reasonableness; and that if the attorney had performed adequately the outcome would have been different.
“But if you look at the judge's opinion, there was no reason not to include the lesser-included offense in the charge,'' Adler said.
The background to Atlas' Oct. 11 decision in Mejia v. Stephens is as follows.
During his trial, Mejia testified that he stabbed Marcos Torres during a 1998 bar fight after Torres pulled a gun on him. But Mejia's court-appointed lawyer Alex Luna did not request any jury instructions for the lesser included offense of manslaughter, relying completely on the argument that Mejia had acted in self-defense.
At the charging conference when the court explicitly noted that the charge did not submit any lesser included offenses to the jury, Luna confirmed that he wanted the murder charge submitted to the jury without any additional instructions.
In state habeas proceedings, when asked to explain his failure to request additional jury instructions, Luna explained his rationale for his decision was that “the strategy of the whole trial was self-defense.” According to Luna, the jury would have been required to find him not guilty of murder if found he was justified by self-defense.
“This argument is unavailing because, in fact, Luna was not required to forego the self-defense justification in order to request a manslaughter instruction,” Atlas wrote. She concluded Luna's performance fell below an objective standard of reasonableness because he could have asked for instructions on both murder and manslaughter and asked for an all-out acquittal of both charges.
Atlas also faulted Luna for failing to submit a “sudden passion” instruction to the jury — a statutory defense to murder that a defendant may raise during the punishment phase of a trial that reduces a murder conviction to 20 years if successful. To succeed, a defendant must prove that he's been provoked by adequate cause defined as rage “sufficient to render the mind incapable of cool reflection.”
“Because the sudden passion defense would have reduced Mejia's murder conviction to a second degree felony, with a maximum prison term of twenty years, the prejudice to Mejia was significant,” Atlas wrote.
Atlas' decision orders Mejia to be released from custody unless the State of Texas initiates retrial proceedings within 180 days.
Mejia wrote his own pro sea writ of habeas corpus claiming ineffective assistance of counsel and Adler was appointed by a federal judge to represent him in 2015. Adler is pleased with the decision and notes it would not have been possible had Mejia not first presented the claims in his own writ.
“Obviously, we're hopeful that the DA will decide not to pursue this again, but that's out of our control,” Adler said. “But I can tell you this: If they decide to try this again, Mr. Meija is going to get the defense he deserved the first time around.''
A spokesperson for the Texas Attorney General's Office, which opposed Mejia's habeas relief, did not return a call for comment. Luna could not be reached for comment.
“The underlying events are a tragedy in that someone died,” Adler said of Mejia's case. “But the mishandling of his defense just compounded that tragedy.''
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