COA rejects attempt to apply Cronic to TPR IAC claim and affirms
State v. V.T., 2025AP1338-40, 3/23/26, District I (ineligible for publication); case activity
In an interesting ineffectiveness appeal, COA confronts clear-cut deficient performance but declines V.T.’s invitation to depart from the Strickland prejudice standard.
Given the mandatory decisional deadlines for TPR appeals, COA sometimes drops these cases without noting them on the “opinions scheduled for release” page and, as a result, they sometimes slip through the cracks. We’re posting on this one now because it is a more interesting than usual TPR appeal.
V.T. raised complaints about the adequacy of her lawyer’s preparation pretrial, although those complaints went nowhere. (¶¶3-4). Following the adverse jury verdict and ensuing dispositional order, V.T. filed a postdisposition motion alleging that her lawyer was ineffective for failing to review discovery pretrial. (¶6). At the ensuing evidentiary hearing, counsel ultimately admitted she chose not to review the discovery and testified that she believed reviewing four documents in the file was sufficient preparation for a multi-day jury trial. (¶8). The circuit court found counsel’s deficient performance “undisputed” but denied relief under the prejudice prong. (¶6).
On appeal, V.T. renews her argument that the prejudice analysis of United States v. Cronic, rather than Strickland v. Washington applies to her case. (¶12). COA disagrees, reading Cronic narrowly. (Id.). As V.T. has conceded she cannot meet the test for prejudice under Strickland, it therefore affirms. (¶16).
Here, both the circuit court and the court of appeals expressed concern about the quality of counsel’s representation. The circuit court found that counsel’s deficient performance was “undisputed.” And COA agrees that counsel “was most certainly deficient.” This might actually understate the scope of counsel’s failure, as it appears counsel failed to review any discovery and was content to rely on a few pages of materials within the court file in defending her client at a multi-day jury trial. Yet, inevitably, Strickland’s notoriously stringent prejudice prong comes to the rescue, operating to deny V.T. any remedy for the grievously unprofessional errors of appointed counsel.
Notably, V.T. made some effort to get around that difficult standard, arguing that Cronic creates a different universe of IAC claims.In Cronic, SCOTUS held that “because we presume that the lawyer is competent to provide the guiding hand that the defendant needs . . . the burden rests on the accused to demonstrate a constitutional violation. There are, however, circumstances that are so likely to prejudice the accused that the cost of litigating their effect in a particular case is unjustified.” The court then went on to suggest that, if the person is constructively denied the right to counsel or the meaningful ability to subject the State’s case to adversarial testing, then a specific showing prejudice may not be required. But, Cronic didn’t win Cronic and, in fact, we are unaware of any cases post-Cronic seeming to identify a sufficiently deficient attorney such that the magic wand bestowed to appellate courts via Strickland’s prejudice prong is fully out of play.