Gary Lee Hess v. J.F. Mazurkiewicz, Supt. The Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• recognizing that to establish an actual conflict, a defendant “must identify a plausible defense strategy that could have been pursued, and show that this alternative strategy inherently conflicted with, or was rejected due to, [counsel’s] other loyalties or interests”
• holding counsel’s failure “to call [a witness] to testify regarding alleged inconsistencies in the victims’ accounts . . . was a reasonable trial strategy, [given that the] testimony would alert the jury to” information harmful to the defendant
• “If the accused can establish only a potential conflict of interest, prejudice must be proved.”
• “[A] different legal analysis governs whether an actual conflict of interest adversely affects legal representation[.]”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).