Maurice Mason was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of Robin Dennis in 1994. After exhausting his appeals, he filed a habeas corpus petition alleging, among other things, ineffective assistance of counsel. In 2003, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit remanded his case to the district court ordering an evidentiary hearing on his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel during his sentencing phase due to his counsel’s alleged failure to conduct a reasonable investigation into Mason's family background. The district court held the required hearing, concluded Mason's counsel was not constitutionally ineffective, and denied Mason's petition.
On Friday, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed the district court and granted Mason's habeas petition in an opinion by Judge Karen Moore, joined by Judge Eric Clay. According to the majority:
Although Mason’s counsel reviewed records provided by the state that contained some references to violence and drug use in the Mason family home during Mason’s childhood, Mason’s counsel failed to investigate Mason’s background and essentially conducted no interviews of any of Mason’s family members prior to settling upon a plan for the sentencing phase that was limited to appeals for mercy and claims of residual doubt. We hold that trial counsel provided ineffective assistance by failing to interview Mason’s family members and investigate the obvious red flags contained in state records suggesting that Mason’s childhood was pervaded by violence and exposure to drugs in the home from an early age.Judge Danny Boggs dissented.
After we remanded to give the condemned exactly what he asked for, an evidentiary hearing before a federal district judge, the learned trial judge carefully reviewed the evidence presented and correctly applied the relevant federal law under AEDPA and Strickland v. Washington. Today our court continues a distressing trend of finely parsing defense counsel judgments, based on the most charitable (to the condemned) or malevolent (to the defense counsel) view of facts and holds that counsel was constitutionally ineffective. I emphasize constitutionally because in a common-sense way, counsel was of course ineffective – his client was sentenced to death. However, that is not the standard that we are to apply, and I therefore dissent.Judge Boggs opinion concludes:
This opinion sets an almost impossibly high bar for defense counsel in capital cases. Defense counsel is now required “to locate and interview the client’s family members . . . and virtually everyone else who knew the client and his family, including neighbors, teachers, clergy, case workers, doctors, correctional, probation or parole officers, and others” . . . ; he must interview them long enough so that those interviews can be characterized as “extensive” and “in-depth"; every conceivable family member must be contacted, no matter that defense counsel has spoken with the defendant, his wife, mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, and cousin (along with several non-family members); and he must do all this even if he reasonably believes (based on the trial court’s rulings and his own reasonable interpretation of state law) that the introduction of any evidence regarding the defendant’s family background could open the door to truly disastrous rebuttal evidence by the prosecution. Nothing in Strickland or its progeny requires defense counsel to go to such extreme lengths in order to meet the (relatively low) threshold of “reasonably effective assistance.”
Mason’s counsel failed to investigate Mason’s background and essentially conducted no interviews of any of Mason’s family members
Dissent:
Defense counsel is now required “to locate and interview the client’s family members . . . no matter that defense counsel has spoken with the defendant, his wife, mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, and cousin
Huh?
when the interviews took place is the important missing piece. The majority believes the evidence shows that such interviews took place after the strategy decision, the dissent believes the evidence shows that they took place before the strategy decision.
My primary disagreement with the majority is that it makes far too much of the timing of these conversations. Sure, timing relative to an irrevocable decision (such as a choice not to appeal and to let a deadline pass) is important. But timing relative to a revocable decision is meaningless.
My primary disagreement with the dissent is that it does not address the argument made by the majority. It misrepresents the majority as setting the bar much higher than they actually do.
I do, however, agree with the dissent that more in-depth interviews of more people before the decision was made would not have changed it, and the case for prejudice is insufficient.
That said, in the Sixth, I put the odds of an en banc reversal at, say, 80%.
My framework for saying that is as the former law clerk who assisted Judge Carolyn King (then Randall) of the Old Fifth Circuit in drafting the original panel opinion in what was then Washington v. Strickland, the rationale of which was disturbed by the then-new Eleventh Circuit en banc but restored by the SCOTUS in Strickland v. Washington.
As a non-lawyer, I don't see why the parent's alleged drug use and violence has any bearing on the case.
Unless of course they helped him with the rape and are co-defendents.
Did his appeal have any evidence that he was not in fact the rapist & murderer?
Look up some of his employment-discrimination or habeas opinions for a good laugh - as long as you live in one of the other 46 states.
Mason allegedly raped and murdered Robin Dennis.
I assume that this has been proved beyond any doubt?
I assume that Mason is not impaired by reason of insanity?
Therefore Mason is guilty of Rape and Murder?
The penalty for which is death?
I assume that Mason has gone through all the usual appeals for re-trial/mistrial/clemency, etc?
Then, pardon my abysmal ignorance, what does any of this business about Mason's family, friends, etc. and his upbringing. If his family was dysfunctional or drug-addled, so what? Mason committed the rape/murder. Presumably he knows that it is against the law to this sort of thing?
Question: what's going on here? Why is Mason still alive?
Brooks:No. The penalty for which can be death. There are no automatic death penalties in the U.S.
Because the devil made him do it. Or something like that. The court or jury must consider any possible mitigating factor. I'm not quite sure of how an exceptionally messy murder is mitigated, or potentially mitigated, by the fact that the killer had a exceptionally nasty childhood, but somehow it is.
But then I'm not sure (to use the Arizona statutory standards) a jury is supposed to assess whether a murder was *exceptionally* "cruel, heinous, or depraved," when this is likely the only murder they'd heard the details of, let alone seen the gory pictures.
Yes, but Mason was, as I read it, sentenced to death, presumably because of the severity of his crime. Does he then get some sort of partial free pass to rape and murder people because he had (as Dave Hardy puts it) an "exceptionally nasty childhood"?
Yes, Woodson v. North Carolina and Roberts v. Louisiana, more of the post-Furman error(along with Coker v. Georgia) that's why we need to repeal the 8th Amendment and replace it with something properly punitive.
I won't be surprised if I get a scolding for impugning the motives of august members of the federal bench. I will confess error when I learn that Moore/Clay vote to sustain in any death penalty case.
Brooks, whether or not the defendant gets the DP or LWOP is a matter for a fully-informed jury to decide. If they were not adequately informed (I don't claim that factually in this instance, the minutiae of this case are beyond my patience this afternoon), they cannot have properly rendered a sentence.
I don't think murderers with abusive childhoods should be automatically spared the DP, but they should at least have a chance to present that evidence to the jury and let them decide.
Second, you're apparently misunderstanding the procedure here. Nobody said, "Even though you've been sentenced to death, your childhood means we'll change it to life in prison." The issue is whether to sentence him to death in the first place.
For those of us who aren't lawyers, could you explain the difference in terms of substance instead of process? (Because I sure don't see any difference of substance here.)
Also, the Boggs opinion is disgraceful. Completely misrepresents the majority opinion, and the record. The atty "interviewed" the various family members each for about 6 minutes, the day before the sentencing hearing, and after the [ill-informed] "strategic" decision had been made. If I talked to any of your siblings for approx 6 minutes, would you feel satisfied that I had inquired into the circumstances of your background?
And to the folks questioning this guy's background or describing him as a getting a free pass -- come on. Do any of you doubt you'd be a very different person if your parents had constantly beat you, given you pot at age 8, and had you help carry their drugs for them? Also, note that the majority opinion notes the jury *already* deadlocked on the sentencing question. It barely imposed the death penalty as it was -- had they heard about his terrible childhood, who knows what they would have imposed. And, of course, it must be emphasized that the guy isn't going free; just getting a new sentencing hearing. And that jury may well still decide to impose the death penalty. So stop getting your fits of outrage already.
Probably. But I also have about an equal lack of doubts that I'd be a very different person if I grew up in a society where a terrible childhood was an excuse for murder and rape. Assuming I survived growing up in that society of course.
Everything in society affects who we are. Robin Dennis's life had value, and the way that the government, as the representative of society, deals with Robin Dennis's murderer affects us as much as our childhoods did (possibly even more, eg many people can kill in wartime, when the government and society generally encourages killing the enemy, and then be quite peaceful after the war has ended even though their childhoods have remained the same).
That is a deliberately misleading sentence in view of everything said above. You know that no one is saying a terrible childhood excuses murder and rape. The issue is not the defendant's guilt or innocence. The issue is whether he deserves the death penalty or life in prison. To say someone should receive life in prison rather than the death penalty for murder and rape is not to excuse that murder and rape.
Absolutely agree and, furthermore, it is only for the jury to decide whether or not those mitigating factors justify LWOP instead of the DP.
If you don't like "mitigating circumstance" can you please suggest the word or phrase that best meets what you were intending to argue in bringing in the point about how our childhoods affect what we are?
My point was that our childhoods are not the only thing that affect our actions, the laws and customs of the society we live in affect our actions too. To say that any person would be different if they had had a different childhood doesn't tell us anything about how we should sentence criminals.
After that they got slightly better and didn't act like obvious tin-pot bribed judges.
This is just par for the course since then though.
Sixth circuit judge thought mode: 'I don't like the death penalty. This guy got sentenced to death, and he really did the terrible thing...hmmmm. Better not turn him loose or the family will get mad and I will get another newspaper article about what a ponce I am and my kids will move to Cali for sure. hmmmm...what about that ineffective defense counsel thing. We used that three months ago to let a guy off death row and the paper was quiet about that.'
"Hey clerk, find something in the briefs where I can claim the defense lawyer shoulda checked something harder."
The attorney here did not have full information; he spent 5 hours reviewing 5,000 pages of documents, and spent about a total of 30 minutes talking to relatives on the day or two before the hearing and days *after* he had decided on his mitigation strategy. Maybe he would have made the same decision not to present the background evidence if had actually interviewed family members and conducted an investigation; the problem is that we can't know that because he didn't investigate or acquire the information.
Something of that nature would not be revealed in the trial record or the appellate briefs, but it would contravene a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel.
Nick
No kidding?
The one person ethically bound to keep his man from getting executed couldn't remember what he did, and that ended up helping his client achieve his goal.
Wow.
That's for the jury to decide after hearing the evidence. They can, in fact, chose to sentence the defendant more leniently based on his childhood.
Contrary to Strickland wasn't telling this to the jury (unless by coincidence a member of this potential future jury happens to be reading this comment section), he was telling it generally to readers on this thread.
Under the circustances it is entirely relevant for me to advance the idea that we would be different not only if we had had a terrible childhood, as Contrary to Strickland states, but that we would also be different if we lived in a society with different laws/customs about what happens to someone who commits murder and rape after a terrible childhood.
I have recently read "The Lucifer Effect", which makes a rather compelling case that our morality is often affected by the norms of whatever society we find ourselves in, more than by our childhoods. Philip Zimbardo is the one who conducted that experiment with the college students divided into guards and prisoners, where very sadistic behaviour developed amongst some of the guards, despite all the students having been screened for a lack of a criminal record and a "normal" personality (as measured by various psychological tests).
Perhaps all juries should be instructed in the findings of the research covered in "The Lucifer Effect" as well as in the terrible childhoods of their victims?
Also, the intro psycho stuff isn't very compelling -- a defense attorney can strategically decide not to present it because it's useless. The defense attorney can also decide not to present mitigating childhood history.
What he cannot do, is fail to even investigate each strategy.