The omission of McClain's testimony as an alibi witness does not constitute ineffective assistance of counsel if its implicated that the defense was aware of its existence and elected to omit it from its defense strategy, counsels failure to use McClain's testimony can easily be relegated to legal tactics and thus would not suffice to satisfy ineffective counsel on its own accord. However if there is sufficient evidence that counsel did not adequately or reasonably contact witnesses who could otherwise exonerate or substantiate critical elements of their clients case than this is enough to hold counsel as deficient. The evidence that either one of these scenarios is absolutely true to me has always been murky but it was enough, along with other deficiencies to win two successful appeal judgements in the lower courts.

As far as Strickland prejudice is concerned it does presuppose that when evaluating prejudice it should be based on the facts presented during trial and not on unreasonable conjecture, albeit there is a little leeway here, this is where things get sticky. The defense is citing that the Maryland court of appeals ruled on grounds outside these specific parameters, where they hypothesized their own narrative of events based on the prosecutions case to determine the reasonableness of the facts and whether prejudice could exist with the omission of McClain's alibi, with which they determined in majority it could not, very close decision. Logically I think most of us would say yeah no, the narrow time frame presented could have a reasonable margin of error and that there is enough evidence to suggest that the defendant had enough culpable involvement that the accuracy of the timeline is of lesser importance in light of other evidence and thus McClain's alibi would have been an insignificant force in proving the defendants innocence. The question however is whether or not this is a proper and fair application of evaluating Strickland or whether the appeals court went off the rails, judging not the tree but the forest. In my opinion its impossible to hold a justice to standards where they cannot intellectualize the nuances of the case as a whole in order to make a sound unbiased judgement, after all they are being asked is this a reasonable presumption of prejudice based on the circumstances? How can you assess if something is reasonable without carefully examining other mitigating factors and evidence in its totality? There is no glowing precedence here, only the question of whether Strickland prejudice applies in this case. This is not the first time this has come up and it wont be the last, which ultimately makes it a poor vehicle for sixth amendment violations but I do agree, in theory there is merit.