Quantrell Liquan McDaniel v. State of Iowa

IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF IOWA
No. 22-1782
Filed December 6, 2023
QUANTRELL LIQUAN MCDANIEL,
Applicant-Appellant,
vs.
STATE OF IOWA,
Respondent-Appellee.
________________________________________________________________
Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Scott County, Henry W. Latham II,
Judge.
Quantrell McDaniel appeals the denial of his application for postconviction
relief. AFFIRMED.
Debra S. De Jong of De Jong Law Firm, P.C., Orange City, for appellant.
Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and Louis S. Sloven, Assistant Attorney
General, for appellee State.
Considered by Greer, P.J., and Schumacher and Badding, JJ.
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BADDING, Judge.
Quantrell McDaniel appeals the denial of his application for postconviction
relief that challenged his guilty plea to second-degree murder. At the hearing on
his application, McDaniel told the district court: “I never wanted to take this plea. I
took it because that’s what I was told was best for me and what I should do.” Upon
our de novo review of the record, see Sothman v. State, 967 N.W.2d 521, 522
(Iowa 2021), we affirm the court’s rejection of this claim of ineffective assistance
of trial counsel.
Late in the morning on the second day of McDaniel’s trial for first-degree
murder and going armed with intent—after a jury had been selected and sworn
in—he accepted a “Hail Mary” of a plea deal his attorneys managed to secure from
the State. The parties agreed McDaniel would plead guilty to the lesser offense of
second-degree murder in exchange for the State’s dismissal of the other count.
After a long colloquy with McDaniel, the district court accepted his plea and
scheduled a sentencing hearing.
The day before his sentencing in March 2017, McDaniel filed a pro se
motion in arrest of judgment asserting:
1. I feel that I was a little pressured by my attorneys to take
the plea agreement and had very little time to think on my own.
2. My attorneys also were telling me to take the plea or I would
be found guilty of charges murder in the first and receive [a] life
sentence. They also were telling me that I’m guilty already as
charge[d].
But at the hearing the next day, McDaniel withdrew his motion. The court then
sentenced him to prison for a term not to exceed fifty years, with a mandatory
minimum of thirty-five years.
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McDaniel applied for postconviction relief in January 2019. In an amended
application, he claimed that his trial attorneys “were ineffective in . . . advising [him]
to plead guilty to second-degree murder.” Both of McDaniel’s experienced trial
attorneys—Mike Adams and Jill Eimermann—testified at his hearing in August
2022. Each recalled that McDaniel had rejected an earlier offer from the State to
plead guilty to second-degree murder. But Adams said that as trial approached,
McDaniel “didn’t want to take his chances at trial, he wanted second degree
murder.” That was apparent from a pro se motion McDaniel filed the week before
trial, asking the prosecutor to agree to “a plea of 35 years with 70%.” Adams
testified that he and Eimermann presented the last-minute deal to McDaniel by
explain[ing] to him that it’s his choice, we’re there, we’re ready to go
to trial. . . . I basically told him and we told him it’s your choice. If
that is what you want, we have found a way to get it to you. If you
don’t want that, our only other choice is to go to trial and take our
chances.
Eimermann thought that while she “may have been very clear in what [she] thought
he ought to do,” she would not have pressured him to plead guilty because, “at the
end of the day, my clients, it’s a choice that they each have to make.”
Yet McDaniel testified he felt pressured, explaining:
There was pressure because I felt like my attorneys was
constantly telling me like, man, this is the best thing for you to do,
this is what you should do, our chances of winning is slim. So if a
person is sitting there telling me we don’t have a good chance to beat
this thing, so that’s basically saying if you don’t take this plea, you’re
going to lose, you need to take the plea, that’s what you need to do.
On cross, McDaniel was confronted with the statements he made to the
court during his guilty plea colloquy, including that he was satisfied with his
attorneys’ advice; no promises or threats had been made to get him to plead guilty;
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his decision was his “own voluntary right and act”; and he understood his rights,
the nature of the charge, and the consequences of his guilty plea. When asked
whether he lied to the judge when making those statements, McDaniel said, “I just
don’t think I understood the seriousness of the questions that he [was] asking me.”
He also testified, “My attorney told me to say that, say ‘yes’ to everything [the judge]
said in order to get the plea, so I said ‘yes.’”
In its ruling denying McDaniel’s application, the district court concluded
McDaniel failed to prove that his attorneys’ performance fell below the standard of
reasonable competence. The court found the attorneys provided “sound counsel”
to McDaniel about his plea and the record showed he “made a knowing and
voluntary decision to accept the plea.” So the court denied McDaniel’s
postconviction-relief application.
Claims of pre-plea ineffective assistance of counsel bearing on the
voluntary and intelligent nature of the plea survive the plea itself. See Castro v.
State, 795 N.W.2d 789, 793 (Iowa 2011). To prevail on a claim of ineffective
assistance of counsel, McDaniel must establish, by a preponderance of the
evidence, that (1) counsel failed to perform an essential duty, and (2) this failure
resulted in prejudice. Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687 (1984);
Sothman, 967 N.W.2d at 522. Failure to prove either prong will preclude relief.
State v. McNeal, 897 N.W.2d 697, 703 (Iowa 2017). We agree with the district
court that the first prong is dispositive.
On appeal, McDaniel concedes the district court followed the guidelines of
Iowa Rule of Criminal Procedure 2.8(2)(b) in taking his guilty plea. Yet McDaniel
argues
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that the statements he made to the court at that time were false; that
he answered all of the questions the way his attorneys told him to;
that he didn’t have enough time to think about or talk over the plea
offer; and that the plea was not of his own free will.
The district court found “none of McDaniel’s testimony . . . credible whatsoever,”
especially his insinuations that he lacked the “maturity to appreciate the gravity of
the situation or understanding his attorneys or the court during the plea
proceeding.” We defer to this credibility finding, which the record supports. See
Sothman, 967 N.W.2d at 522.
At the postconviction-relief hearing, McDaniel’s attorneys testified that he
had about thirty minutes or so to decide whether to take the plea offer. Eimermann
explained:
[T]hese negotiations that we were having literally in the midst of the
trial would have taken some time. . . . It wasn’t something that
happened really quickly. And so in the midst of all of that, we would
have been talking with our client. So, you know, it took a little time
for this to actually—actually come to pass.
And it was an offer that McDaniel had considered earlier in the case, rejected, and
then sought again in the lead-up to the trial. While McDaniel wasn’t happy with the
mandatory minimum and testified that he “didn’t really want to take it at the time,”
reluctance does not equal involuntariness. See Puckett v. State,
No. 17-0839, 2018 WL 4922985, at *3 (Iowa Ct. App. Oct. 10, 2018); accord State
v. Speed, 573 N.W.2d 594, 597 (Iowa 1998) (“Lawyers and other professionals
often persuade clients to act upon advice which is unwillingly or reluctantly
accepted. And the fact that such advice is unwillingly or reluctantly acted upon is
not a factor overreaching defendant’s free and clear judgment of what should be
done . . . .” (cleaned up) (citation omitted)).
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“No doubt no accused wants to be charged with crime, nor would he like to
enter a plea of guilty in any case. The law contemplates that he have an uncoerced
election to plead guilty or not guilty, after he has had the benefit and advice of
competent counsel.” State v. Lindsey, 171 N.W.2d 859, 865 (Iowa 1969) (citation
omitted). McDaniel had that here. His attorneys testified their planned defense at
trial was justification. But it was not a winning defense in their opinion because it
was “essentially undisputed” that McDaniel chased down the victim and shot him
with a gun. So they thought it was in his “best interests to take . . . anything that
wasn’t Murder in the First Degree.” See id. (“The fact that an accused may elect
to plead guilty to a lesser offense when he is also charged with a more serious
offense does not make his plea coerced.”). And they had “ongoing discussions”
with McDaniel in the lead-up to trial about the strengths and weaknesses of his
defense. When the plea offer was renewed, Adams testified that he presented it
to McDaniel as he did with other clients: “I try to give them the pros and the cons.
I try to answer their questions. And it’s their choice. It’s their case. It’s their lives.”
“This is precisely the type of assessment we expect trial attorneys to do” when
advising their clients about a plea offer. McDanel v. State, No. 21-0906, 2022 WL
3906779, at *2 (Iowa Ct. App. Aug. 31, 2022).
Because McDaniel’s self-serving version of the events—which the district
court found lacking in credibility—is contradicted by the record, we agree with the
district court that McDaniel did not prove that his attorneys breached an essential
duty. We affirm.
AFFIRMED.