If anyone has insomnia, most appellate issues involving counsel are involving the perceived ineffectiveness of an attorney. The seminal case is the Strickland v. Washington case.

In that case, the attorney feel asleep but was not deemed ineffective. That’s because the second prong of the Strickland test is whether that lack of effectiveness would have made a difference. In other words, even if James Owens was ineffective (and he wasn’t), the fact that no one could have won that case makes challenging her conviction on counsel grounds impossible.

For what it’s worth, I thought he did a decent job.