Kenneth G. Pavel v. Melvin L. Hollins, Superintendent, Oneida Correctional Facility Eliot L. Spitzer, Attorney General of New York State

How courts have described this case

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

• concluding that trial counsel’s decision not to call a witness could not be considered strategic but then considering whether attorney’s performance was unreasonable
• concluding that counsel was ineffective in a child sexual abuse case where his failure to call a medical expert was based on an insufficient investigation
• finding that counsel’s “decision not to call a medical expert was deficient because it was not based on pre-trial consultation with such an expert”
• holding that the attorney’s decision not to call witnesses might have been strategic in some sense of the word, but “it was not the sort of conscious, reasonably informed decision made by an attorney with an eye to benefitting his client”
• stating that “an attorney’s failure to present available exculpatory evidence is ordinarily deficient, unless some cogent tactical or other consideration justified it”
• noting that “[t]he 7 Petitioner principally asserts that counsel should have called Domando and Abato as witnesses to establish that these individuals had a long history of referring (presumably legitimate

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).