Williams v. State

Richard Williams II was convicted of murder in Fulton County for strangling Cory Robinson, his boyfriend, in a hotel room. On appeal, Williams argued his trial lawyer should have investigated and presented a defense that Robinson's death was an accident that happened during consensual erotic asphyxiation, a sexual practice involving restricted breathing. Williams claimed his lawyer refused to hear that explanation out of discomfort with the topic and instead pushed a false theory blaming a friend, Kelvin Spencer, for the killing. At a hearing, Williams and several witnesses testified to support the accident theory, but his lawyer testified that Williams had admitted to killing Robinson without ever mentioning an accident, and that they had freely discussed and jointly chosen the strategy of blaming Spencer. The trial court believed the lawyer's version, and the Supreme Court of Georgia agreed that a lawyer cannot be faulted for not investigating a defense his client never told him about. The court affirmed the conviction.

A defense lawyer does not perform deficiently by failing to investigate or present a defense theory that the client never disclosed to him, especially where the trial court credited the lawyer's account that they freely discussed the case and mutually chose a different strategy; Williams therefore failed to show ineffective assistance of counsel.

The ruling reinforces that defense lawyers are not required to guess at or independently uncover explanations a client never shares with them, which matters for how ineffective-assistance claims are evaluated in future Georgia criminal appeals involving disputed factual accounts between client and counsel.

Affirmed

1. The court applied the two-part test from Strickland v. Washington, which requires a defendant claiming ineffective assistance to show both that his lawyer's performance was objectively unreasonable and that this failure likely changed the outcome of the trial.
2. Because Williams's claim rested entirely on his lawyer's failure to pursue an accident-during-erotic-asphyxiation defense, the court examined whether the lawyer had any reason to know about or investigate that theory.
3. The lawyer testified that Williams admitted to killing the victim but never mentioned an accident, and that the two had discussed the case freely and jointly chosen to blame a third person instead; the trial court implicitly believed the lawyer over Williams, and appellate courts defer to such factual findings unless clearly wrong.
4. Relying on Strickland's rule that a lawyer's investigation duties depend heavily on what the client actually tells him, and on Georgia case law holding that a lawyer is not deficient for failing to uncover information the client could have provided, the court concluded the lawyer acted reasonably in not pursuing the accident defense.
5. Because Williams could not show deficient performance, the court did not need to separately analyze whether the omission changed the outcome of the trial, and it upheld the denial of his motion for new trial.

• murder conviction
• ineffective assistance of counsel
• erotic asphyxiation defense
• Fulton County
• strangulation death