State v. A. Soapes

Summary

The Court affirmed Soapes’s convictions and declined to review his unpreserved challenges to a law-enforcement supervisor’s service on the jury and the joinder of the offenses under the plain-error doctrine. It concluded that Soapes’s affirmative decisions to retain the juror and failure to show prejudicially unfair joinder did not satisfy plain error review. The Court also declined to decide his ineffective-assistance claims on direct appeal because the record did not establish why counsel acted as he did, while permitting those claims to be pursued in postconviction proceedings with appointed counsel.