North Dakota Supreme Court overturns Lyft driver’s new rape trial

Corey Wickham, 42, of Mandan, was accused in August 2018 of raping a Lyft buyer after driving her residence. He was convicted in 2019 of two sexual assault felonies, one among which carried a doable life sentence. He was sentenced to twenty years in jail. The state Supreme Courtroom upheld the conviction in January 2020.

Wickham in 2021 sought a brand new trial. He argued that his protection lawyer ought to have objected to a police detective’s testimony about Wickham’s request for an lawyer. Jurors have been deadlocked after a number of hours of deliberation and requested for the testimony to be learn again to them. They returned a responsible verdict lower than an hour later.

South Central District Decide Bobbi Weiler agreed with Wickham’s competition that his constitutional rights have been violated. Weiler said in her ruling that if the objection had been raised she would have granted a mistrial. She said additional that if the jury hadn’t heard the testimony “particularly for a second time, there’s a cheap chance that the jury might have remained deadlocked and a mistrial would have been ordered.”

Prosecutors from the Burleigh County State’s Lawyer’s Workplace appealed Weiler’s ruling on grounds that the protection lawyer’s failure to object didn’t quantity to ineffective help of counsel. The protection lawyer on the post-conviction listening to “gave coherent and rational causes” for not objecting to the detective’s feedback, in accordance with a short submitted by Assistant State’s Attorneys Joshua Amundson and David Rappenecker.

They argued additional that Weiler didn’t correctly apply the requirements below which such a choice needs to be made and as an alternative relied on “hindsight second-guessing of trial counsel’s efficiency.”

The justices of their ruling stated Weiler’s discovering {that a} mistrial would have been ordered was unsupported. They stated the belief the jury’s impasse was influenced by listening to the detective’s testimony for a second time was “clearly inaccurate,” because the detective’s remark was a part of 60 pages of testimony — all of which was learn again to the jury — and a small a part of the testimony heard from eight state witnesses throughout a three-day trial.

“We’re left with a particular and agency conviction the district courtroom was mistaken to find the trial counsel’s failure to object raises an inexpensive chance of a distinct outcome,” the panel wrote.