Bad Parenting Evidence Prejudiced Defendant

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court vacated a domestic violence conviction based on a mother’s slap of her daughter for refusing a haircut, concluding that trial counsel errors prejudiced the defendant

we hold that due to the cumulative effect of trial counsel’s opening the door to Pratt’s parenting practices and his failure to object to prosecutorial error, there is a reasonable probability that the outcome of the proceeding would have been different. We therefore vacate the judgment denying Pratt’s petition for post-conviction review, and we remand to the PCR court to enter a judgment granting Pratt’s petition and vacating the conviction in the underlying criminal judgment.

Parenting practices

Pratt asserts that trial counsel’s performance was deficient because he failed to understand that Pratt hit the victim in self-defense and he, therefore, did not need to open the door to prejudicial evidence regarding Pratt’s parenting practices by raising the parental discipline justification during opening statements. Pratt contends that her self-defense theory was “readily apparent from the beginning of the attorney-client relationship” and that trial counsel “should have simply asked his client how she would testify.”

Trial counsel error

In short, contrary to the reasoning of the PCR court, trial counsel in fact expected Pratt to testify and he knew that she was suggesting that she acted in self-defense. Under these circumstances and for the reasons stated above, we conclude that trial counsel’s decision to open the door to prejudicial evidence of Pratt’s parenting practices during opening statements fell below the objective standard of reasonableness, and the PCR court erred by concluding otherwise.

Prejudice

if trial counsel had not placed the parental discipline justification in issue, the victim’s testimony about Pratt’s parenting practices would have been inadmissible evidence of bad character. Under such circumstances, the jury would not have heard the victim’s testimony about Pratt not spending time with the children, the children making their own meals, or Pratt not doing the victim’s laundry. See Pratt, 2020 ME 141, ¶ 8, 243 A.3d 469. We believe the testimony about Pratt’s parenting practices— which did not make it any more or less probable that Pratt struck the victim or acted in self-defense and served only to establish and highlight Pratt’s bad character—reasonably could have impacted the jury’s verdict and thus is of significant prejudicial effect.

(Mike Frisch)