DISCLAIMER: The following unofficial case summaries are prepared by the clerk's office
as a courtesy to the reader. They are not part of the opinion of the court.
172332P.pdf 04/24/2018 Manuel Camacho v. Wendy Kelley
U.S. Court of Appeals Case No: 17-2332
U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas - Fayetteville
[PUBLISHED] [Erickson, Author, with Wollman and Shepherd, Circuit Judges]
Prisoner case - Habeas. In a state criminal prosecution in which Camacho
pleaded guilty to Accomplice to Murder and received a life sentence, the
district court did not err in determining that Camacho's lawyers were not
ineffective in allowing him to plead guilty without first seeking an
evaluation to determine whether he was competent to enter the plea in
light of an earlier report that noted that Comacho suffered from PTSD with
accompanying frontal lobe disorder; the lawyers were correct in their
assessment that the diagnosis was insufficient, standing alone to
establish a lack of fitness to proceed to trial or enter a plea; their
assessments were buttressed by their observations of Camacho before and
during trial; taken as a whole, the evidence was insufficient to establish
a reasonable probability that Comacho would have been found incompetent to
proceed, and Comacho could not, therefore, establish prejudice