ISAIAH ANDREW CLARK
v.
STATE OF FLORIDA
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A postconviction court cannot summarily deny an ineffective assistance of counsel claim based on jury instructions without including the jury instructions in the record to demonstrate conclusive refutation.
[1] A postconviction court must include in the appellate record the specific portions of the record upon which it relies to conclusively refute an ineffective assistance of c…
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Join FLexlaw to unlock all legal intelligence“If the claim is legally sufficient, unless the record shows conclusively that the appellant is entitled to no relief, the order must be reversed and the cause remanded for an evidentiary hearing or other appropriate relief.”
Standard for reviewing summary denial of postconviction relief claims
Isaiah Andrew Clark appealed a final order denying his motion for postconviction relief on ten grounds alleging ineffective assistance of trial counse…
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FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF APPEAL
STATE OF FLORIDA
No. 1D2025-1009
ISAIAH ANDREW CLARK, Appellant,
V.
STATE OF FLORIDA, Appellee.
On appeal from the Circuit Court for Alachua County. James M. Colaw, Judge.
May 13, 2026
PER CURIAM.
In this belated appeal, Isaiah Andrew Clark challenges the final order denying his motion for postconviction relief on all ten grounds alleging ineffective assistance of trial counsel. We find that the court erred in summarily denying ground nine. We affirm the denial of the remaining grounds.
If the claim is legally sufficient, unless the record shows conclusively that the appellant is entitled to no relief, the order must be reversed and the cause remanded for an evidentiary hearing or other appropriate relief. See Fla. R. App. P. 9.141(b)(1)(D); Griggs v. State, 995 So. 2d 994, 995 (Fla. 1st DCA 2008) (“We review the summary denial of claims for postconviction
relief to determine whether the claims are legally sufficient and whether they are conclusively refuted by the record.").
In ground nine of his motion, Appellant alleged that counsel was ineffective for failing to object to jury instructions as unsupported by the evidence, which he claims confused and misled the jury. The court found that this ground was conclusively refuted by the record, which it asserted showed that the jury instructions mirrored the standard jury instructions for both counts.
The court's order suggests that it intended to attach the jury instructions that were read to the jury. But the record on appeal does not include the jury instructions. This ground is therefore not conclusively refuted by the record. We reverse the portion of the order summarily denying ground nine and remand with instructions that the postconviction court attach to its order portions of the record that conclusively refute the claim. See Pantoja v. State, 226 So. 3d 1043, 1045–46 (Fla. 1st DCA 2017).
AFFIRMED in part; REVERSED in part; REMANDED.
KELSEY, M.K. THOMAS, and LONG, JJ., concur.
Cases With Similar Vibessemantic neighbors from the corpus
Citator
Authorities Cited
- Griggs v. State, 995 So. 2d 994 (Fla. 1st DCA 2008)
- Pantoja v. State, 226 So. 3d 1043 (Fla. 1st DCA 2017)