State v. Pennington , 2021 Ohio 3365 ( 2021 )

[Cite as State v. Pennington, 2021-Ohio-3365.]
IN THE COURT OF APPEALS
FIRST APPELLATE DISTRICT OF OHIO
HAMILTON COUNTY, OHIO
STATE OF OHIO, : APPEAL NO. C-200358
TRIAL NO. B-1101474
Plaintiff-Appellee, :
vs. : O P I N I O N.
WILLIAM PENNINGTON, :
Defendant-Appellant. :
Criminal Appeal From: Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas
Judgment Appealed From Is: Affirmed
Date of Judgment Entry on Appeal: September 24, 2021
Joseph T. Deters, Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney, and Mary Stier, Assistant
Prosecuting Attorney, for Plaintiff-Appellee,
Patituce & Associates and Kimberly Kendall Corral, for Defendant-Appellant.
OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
WINKLER, Judge.
{¶1} Defendant-appellant William Pennington appeals the Hamilton
County Common Pleas Court’s judgment overruling his Crim.R. 32.1 motion to
withdraw his guilty pleas to murder and two counts of aggravated robbery. We
affirm the court’s judgment.
{¶2} Pennington was indicted in 2011 on three counts of aggravated robbery
and robbery, four counts of having weapons while under a disability, and single
counts of aggravated murder, carrying a concealed weapon, and possession of
cocaine, in connection with three incidents in a single week: the robberies of two
different pizza-delivery drivers and the shooting death of a restaurant cashier during
an armed robbery. Six months later, Pennington was convicted upon guilty pleas to a
reduced charge of murder and two counts of aggravated robbery and was sentenced
to agreed concurrent prison terms totaling 18 years to life. He did not appeal his
convictions.
{¶3} In 2019, Pennington filed with the common pleas court a Crim.R. 32.1
motion to withdraw his guilty pleas. In this appeal from the denial of that motion,
Pennington advances five assignments of error. Those assignments of error, distilled
to their essence, challenge the common pleas court’s exercise of its discretion in
denying, and in declining to conduct an evidentiary hearing on, his motion to
withdraw his guilty pleas, when newly discovered evidence demonstrated that his
guilty pleas had been the unknowing and involuntary product of his trial counsel’s
ineffectiveness in advising him to plead, and that the common pleas court’s decision
denying the motion had been based on its misperception of the evidence of record
and its consideration of evidence outside of the record. We address the assignments
of error together and find that they are not well taken.
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OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
Crim.R. 32.1 Motion to Withdraw Guilty Pleas
{¶4} In his Crim.R. 32.1 motion, Pennington argued that withdrawal of his
guilty pleas was necessary to correct a manifest injustice, because newly discovered
evidence demonstrated that he was actually innocent in the cashier’s murder and
that his trial counsel had been constitutionally ineffective in advising him to plead
guilty to the charge. Pennington asserted that he had been intent on going to trial
until he was persuaded to accept the state’s plea offer by his trial counsel’s inaccurate
assessment of the evidence against him and inaccurate statement concerning his
agreed sentence.
{¶5} Pennington supported his motion with outside evidence in the form of
the Cincinnati Police Department’s summary of its investigation into the October 30,
2010 murder of the restaurant cashier. That summary included a statement to police
made on December 3, 2010, by area drug dealer Benny Lyles, after a confidential
informant told the police that Lyles had information about the murder. In an
unrecorded interview, Lyles identified Pennington as one of two men who he saw
mask up and cross the street toward the restaurant at the time of the murder. And
from a video of the robbery, Lyles identified Pennington as the shooter. The
summary also included a detective’s “[n]ote” that, “[a]t this time, Benny Lyles is
uncooperative with participating in [Pennington’s] prosecution, however I will be
making attempts to encourage his cooperation. * * * Lyles is on felony probation for
drug trafficking * * *.” Lyles was not included in the summary’s witness list. And the
state did not list him as a witness in its response to Pennington’s discovery request.
{¶6} The summary provided other details of the murder investigation. The
restaurant robbery homicide was captured on video. The video showed that the
shooter had stood on a countertop to fire the fatal shot. From that countertop, the
police lifted “shoe prints with visible wear patterns.” The video also prompted police
to look for someone who was experienced in armed robbery and familiar with the
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OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
area and the restaurant’s layout. Eventually, at least nine tipsters identified
Pennington as the shooter, leading detectives to review other recent armed robberies
in the area. In the course of a parallel investigation into the pizza-delivery robberies,
the police found one victim’s wallet in a search of Pennington’s room, and a second
victim identified Pennington as the robber in a photo line-up and said that the gun in
the video of the cashier’s murder looked exactly like the gun he had been robbed
with. In a search incident to Pennington’s arrest on a probation violation, the police
seized a .380-caliber handgun. After Pennington’s arrest for the pizza-delivery
robberies, his shoes were seized, and laboratory analysis of the shoes showed that
they had made the prints on the restaurant’s countertop “to the exclusion of all
others.” Also, Pennington’s cellmate in the Hamilton County Justice Center told
detectives that Pennington had confessed to killing the cashier after he refused to
cooperate.
{¶7} The motion was also supported with an affidavit made in 2018 by
Benny Lyles. In his affidavit, Lyles stated that because of “bad blood” between him
and Pennington, he had given a “false” statement to police that he had seen a masked
Pennington enter the restaurant at the time of the murder. Lyles insisted that his
conscience now compelled him to “clear” the “[i]naccurate details” in his statement,
because “actually [he] had seen [Pennington] & other friends earlier before 10 PM
[but] was at home by 10 PM,” when the murder occurred.
{¶8} Pennington provided his own affidavit. He averred that he had
accepted the state’s plea offer, because trial counsel told him that if he went to trial,
Lyles’s testimony would almost certainly convict him of aggravated murder and
subject him to a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, but that if he
accepted the state’s plea offer with the agreed sentence, he would “be out at the age
of 36.” Pennington also offered the investigation summary in support of his
assertion that, but for Lyle’s “false” statement, he would not have pled guilty to
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OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
murder, because the only other evidence implicating him in the murder was his
involvement in robbing pizza-delivery drivers and the fact that he wore the same
style of sneakers as the restaurant shooter.
{¶9} Finally, Pennington argues that the common pleas court denied his
Crim.R. 32.1 motion based on its misperception of the evidence of record and its
consideration of evidence outside of the record. And he asks this court to remand
this case for an evidentiary hearing to afford him the opportunity to support that
argument with outside evidence in the form of statements made to the media by the
common pleas court after the court denied his Crim.R. 32.1 motion. But Pennington
twice before sought to make those statements a part of the record on appeal. We
denied those motions. And we decline his invitation here to revisit those rulings.
{¶10} The standard of review. Crim.R. 32.1 confers upon a trial court
the discretion to permit withdrawal of a guilty or no-contest plea after sentencing “to
correct manifest injustice.” The decision to grant or deny a Crim.R. 32.1 motion will
not be disturbed on appeal unless the court abused its discretion. See State v. Smith,
49 Ohio St.2d 261, 361 N.E.2d 1324 (1977), paragraphs one and two of the syllabus;
State v. Brown, 1st Dist. Hamilton No. C-010755, 2002-Ohio-5813, ¶ 13.
{¶11} A counseled knowing, voluntary, and intelligent plea of guilty to an
offense constitutes a complete admission of the facts underlying the offense and
effectively removes from the case any issue concerning the defendant’s factual guilt
of the offense. See Crim.R. 11(B)(1); State v. Wilson, 58 Ohio St.2d 52, 388 N.E.2d
745 (1979), paragraph one of the syllabus. Therefore, a challenge to a conviction
upon a guilty plea must be directed against the knowing, voluntary, or intelligent
nature of that plea. See State v. Mynatt, 1st Dist. Hamilton Nos. C-100298 and C-
100319, 2011-Ohio-1358, ¶ 7-10, citing State v. Spates, 64 Ohio St.3d 269, 272, 595
N.E.2d 351 (1992).
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OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
{¶12} In his motion, Pennington essentially argued that his guilty plea to
murder had been the unknowing and involuntary product of his trial counsel’s
ineffectiveness. To prevail on that claim, Pennington bore the burden of
demonstrating that his counsel’s performance had been deficient in the sense that it
was not reasonable under the circumstances, Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S.
668, 687-688, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984), and that there was a
reasonable probability that, but for this deficiency, he would not have pled guilty, but
would have insisted on going to trial. Hill v. Lockhart, 474 U.S. 52, 59, 106 S.Ct.
366, 88 L.Ed.2d 203 (1985); State v. Xie, 62 Ohio St.3d 521, 524, 584 N.E.2d 715(1992).
{¶13} Crim.R. 32.1 does not expressly require a court to hold a hearing on a
postsentence motion to withdraw a guilty plea. But this court has effectively adopted
a rule that requires a hearing if the facts alleged in the motion, and accepted as true
by the court, would require that the plea be withdrawn. The decision whether to hold
a hearing is discretionary and may be reversed on appeal only if the court abused its
discretion. Brown at ¶ 20.
{¶14} In deciding a Crim.R. 32.1 motion, the court must accord due
deference to any supporting affidavits. But the court has the discretion to judge the
credibility of an affidavit without first conducting an evidentiary hearing on the
motion. In assessing an affidavit’s credibility, and thus determining the need for a
hearing, the court must consider all relevant factors, including (1) whether the judge
reviewing the motion also presided at the plea hearing, (2) whether multiple
affidavits contain nearly identical language or otherwise appear to have been drafted
by the same person, (3) whether the affidavit contains or relies on hearsay, (4)
whether the affiant is related to the defendant or otherwise interested in the success
of his efforts, (5) whether the affidavit contradicts defense evidence, (6) whether the
affidavit is contradicted by any other sworn statement of the affiant, and (7) whether
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OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
the affidavit is internally inconsistent. Mynatt at ¶ 18-20 (adopting for purposes of a
Crim.R. 32.1 motion the factors set forth in State v. Calhoun, 86 Ohio St.3d 279, 714
N.E.2d 905 (1999), for assessing affidavits submitted in support of a postconviction
petition).
{¶15} No abuse of discretion. The record of the proceedings at
Pennington’s plea and sentencing hearing contradicts his self-serving statement in
his affidavit that his trial counsel had told him that, with the agreed sentence, he
would “be out at the age of 36.” At that hearing, Pennington acknowledged his
understanding of the agreed indefinite 18-to-life sentence, of the potential maximum
sentence of 38 years to life if his sentences were run consecutively, and that the Ohio
Department of Corrections could place him on parole “if released from prison.” He
also said nothing when the trial court advised the murder victim’s family
spokesperson that the department of corrections or the parole board would
determine “whether Mr. Pennington ever gets out.” And he denied that his plea had
been compelled by any threat or promise.
{¶16} Nor does the evidence support Pennington’s claim that his trial
counsel had been ineffective in urging him to plead to a reduced charge of murder
rather than face an almost-certain aggravated-murder conviction based on Lyles’s
testimony. Lyles, in his 2019 affidavit, confirmed that he had earlier seen
Pennington in the vicinity of the restaurant, but asserted that he had been home at
10:00 p.m., when the murder occurred. That effort by Lyles to “clear [up]” the
“[i]naccurate details” in his 2010 statement to the police did not exonerate
Pennington in the cashier’s murder. The common pleas court would not have abused
its discretion in discrediting that “cl[arification],” when it directly contradicted his
statement to the police, and the judge deciding Pennington’s Crim.R. 32.1 motion
had also presided at his plea and sentencing hearing. See Mynatt, 1st Dist. Hamilton
Nos. C-100298 and C-100319, 2011-Ohio-1358, at ¶ 18-20. The summary of the
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OHIO FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEALS
murder investigation belies Pennington’s contention that Lyles’s statement to the
police was the only evidence of his guilt in the cashier’s murder. And the summary
does not show conclusively that Lyles would not have testified at trial, or that
Pennington’s trial counsel knew, or should have known, that Lyles would not testify.
We Affirm
{¶17} Pennington did not sustain his burden of demonstrating a prejudicial
deficiency on the part of his trial counsel in advising him to plead guilty to the
reduced charge of murder. Thus, he failed to show that withdrawal of his guilty pleas
was necessary to correct a manifest injustice. We, therefore, hold that the common
pleas court did not abuse its discretion in denying, without an evidentiary hearing,
his Crim.R. 32.1 motion to withdraw his guilty pleas. Accordingly, we overrule the
assignments of error and affirm the common pleas court’s judgment denying the
motion.
Judgment affirmed.
ZAYAS, P.J., and MYERS, J., concur.
Please note:
The court has recorded its own entry on the date of the release of this opinion.
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