Bentley v. State

Kevin Bentley was convicted in Chatham County of malice murder for strangling Altonise Jones to death. Cell phone data placed his phone near her home during the time of the killing, and his DNA matched samples found under her fingernails and on a cigarette in her bedroom. Bentley chose to represent himself at trial after a Faretta hearing, where the judge warned him that if it allowed him to represent himself, it would not later reverse that decision. On appeal, Bentley argued the judge's warning was legal error and that his trial counsel should have objected to it. The Supreme Court of Georgia found that Bentley never objected at the time, so that claim was not preserved for appeal. It also found that counsel's decision not to object was a reasonable strategic choice, because the warning served to discourage Bentley from giving up his right to a lawyer. The court affirmed the conviction.

A claim that a trial court erred during a Faretta hearing is not preserved for appeal absent a contemporaneous objection, and trial counsel is not constitutionally deficient for declining to object to a judge's warning that discourages self-representation when that choice reflects reasonable strategy.

The decision reinforces that Georgia defendants and their lawyers must object in the moment to preserve claims about a judge's warnings during self-representation hearings, and it confirms that lawyers have wide latitude to let such warnings stand when they may discourage a client from waiving counsel.

Affirmed

1. The court applied the rule that a claim of trial court error must be objected to at the time it occurs to be preserved for appellate review; because neither Bentley nor his counsel objected to the judge's statement during the Faretta hearing (the hearing where a court warns a defendant about the dangers of representing himself), that claim was not preserved.
2. The court noted the trial judge never actually barred Bentley from later requesting counsel, undercutting his argument that objecting would have been futile.
3. For the ineffective-assistance claim, the court applied the Strickland standard, which requires showing both that the lawyer's performance was objectively unreasonable and that this failure likely changed the trial's outcome.
4. The court found counsel's testimony that he saw the judge's statement as a strong warning meant to make Bentley pause before waiving counsel was a reasonable strategic explanation, since Faretta hearings exist to make sure a defendant understands the risks of self-representation with 'eyes open.'
5. Because discouraging self-representation generally helps a defendant, the court concluded counsel's decision not to object was not a patently unreasonable strategy, so Bentley failed to show deficient performance and his ineffective-assistance claim failed.

• murder conviction
• self-representation
• ineffective assistance of counsel
• Faretta hearing
• Chatham County