United States v. Taurus Wiggins

UNPUBLISHED
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
No. 11-5125
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
Plaintiff - Appellee,
v.
TAURUS WIGGINS, a/k/a Ock,
Defendant - Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of
Maryland, at Baltimore. William D. Quarles, Jr., District
Judge. (1:09-cr-00287-WDQ-6)
Submitted: August 2, 2012 Decided: August 14, 2012
Before WILKINSON, MOTZ, and WYNN, Circuit Judges.
Affirmed by unpublished per curiam opinion.
Marc L. Resnick, Washington, D.C., for Appellant. Rod J.
Rosenstein, United States Attorney, Philip S. Jackson, Assistant
United States Attorney, Baltimore, Maryland, for Appellee.
Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit.
PER CURIAM:
Taurus Wiggins appeals his conviction by jury of
conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute
heroin. We have thoroughly reviewed the record, and we affirm.
Wiggins’s assertions of error center upon the district
court’s decision to permit him to represent himself at his
trial. He first asserts that the district court erred in
finding, on the morning of Wiggins’s trial, that he had
unequivocally waived his right to counsel and desired to proceed
pro se. A district court’s finding that a defendant waived the
right to counsel is subject to de novo review. United States v.
Singleton, 107 F.3d 1091, 1097 n.3 (4th Cir. 1997). “The
particular requirement that a request for self-representation be
clear and unequivocal is necessary to protect against an
inadvertent waiver of the right to counsel by a defendant’s
occasional musings on the benefits of self-representation.”
United States v. Frazier-El, 204 F.3d 553, 558 (4th Cir. 2000)
(internal quotation marks omitted). Notwithstanding the
requirement that courts “indulge in every reasonable presumption
against waiver” of the right to counsel, see Brewer v. Williams,
430 U.S. 387, 404 (1977), our review of the record convinces us
that Wiggins’s repeated insistence on the morning of his trial
that he wished to represent himself was anything but equivocal.
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Because “the right of self-representation generally must be
honored even if the district court believes that the defendant
would benefit from the advice of counsel,” we conclude that the
district court properly permitted Wiggins to represent himself
at trial. Frazier-El, 204 F.3d at 558.
Wiggins next asserts that the district court should
have terminated his pro se status because the frivolity of his
arguments compromised the fairness of his trial. While “the
trial judge may terminate self-representation by a defendant who
deliberately engages in serious and obstructionist misconduct,”
Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806, 834 n.46 (1975), we do not
agree with Wiggins that his frivolous jurisdictional arguments
and conspiratorial accusations against the district court and
the prosecution suffice to render erroneous the district court’s
failure to terminate, sua sponte, his pro se status.
Finally, Wiggins contends that the district court
erred in failing to hold, sua sponte, a hearing as to Wiggins’s
competency to represent himself. To the extent that Wiggins
asks us to hold that Indiana v. Edwards, 554 U.S. 164 (2008),
affirmatively requires a district court to make explicit
findings regarding a defendant’s competence to conduct his own
defense before granting a motion to proceed pro se, we decline
to transform Edwards’s permissive holding into the rigid edict
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that Wiggins requests. See id. at 178 (“[T]he Constitution
permits States to insist upon representation by counsel for
those competent enough to stand trial . . . but who still suffer
from severe mental illness to the point where they are not
competent to conduct trial proceedings by themselves.” (emphasis
added)); see also United States v. Turner, 644 F.3d 713, 724
(8th Cir. 2011) (Edwards allows, but does not require, a judge
to bar a defendant from proceeding pro se, under limited
circumstances); United States v. Berry, 565 F.3d 385, 391 (7th
Cir. 2009) (same); United States v. DeShazer, 554 F.3d 1281,
1290 (10th Cir. 2009) (same).
To the extent that Wiggins contends that the district
court’s failure to order, sua sponte, a competency hearing was
in any event an abuse of its discretion, we disagree. See
United States v. Banks, 482 F.3d 733, 742 (4th Cir. 2007)
(failure to order, sua sponte, a competency hearing is reviewed
for abuse of discretion). Wiggins’s pursuit of a frivolous
legal argument does not of its own accord require an inquiry
into his mental competence. See id. The district court was
well within its discretion not to order a competency hearing
merely on the basis of Wiggins’s fruitless theories of defense.
Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the district
court. We dispense with oral argument because the facts and
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legal contentions are adequately presented in the material
before the court and argument will not aid the decisional
process.
AFFIRMED
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