Salanoa v. Hawaiian Electric Company, Inc.

How courts have described this case

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

• holding that counsel’s decision not to present an intoxication defense “because it was inconsistent with the deliberateness of [the defendant’s] actions during the [crime]” was reasonable
• observing that courts should presume effectiveness and avoid second guessing with the benefit of hindsight
• stating that, in assessing counsel’s performance, a court “ask[s] only whether some reasonable lawyer at the trial could have acted, in the circumstances, as defense counsel acted at trial.”
• questioning whether counsel would even have presented evidence had he possessed it because it had substantial internal weaknesses
• defendant must establish “that the approach taken by defense counsel would have been used by no professionally competent counsel”
• `We are not interested in grading lawyers' performances; we are interested in whether the adversarial process at trial, in fact, worked adequately.'

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).