The Supreme Court voted 6-3 on May 30 to overturn a lower court ruling that found that an Arizona death row inmate had received ineffective assistance of counsel during the sentencing process.
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant the right to effective assistance of counsel. At issue in this case is whether a federal appeals court properly weighed the mitigating and aggravating evidence regarding the inmate before ruling that respondent Danny Lee Jones was prejudiced by ineffective counsel during sentencing.
The case goes back to March 1992, when Mr. Jones was visiting his friend, Robert Weaver.
Mr. Jones and Mr. Weaver had been using methamphetamine and drinking in Mr. Weaver’s garage in Bullhead City, Arizona when an argument began.
Mr. Jones attacked Mr. Weaver from behind, hitting him in the head with a bat. He also attacked Mr. Weaver’s grandmother, but she survived. Mr. Weaver’s 7-year-old daughter, Tisha, hid in a bedroom, but Mr. Jones found her and struck her twice in the head, then either strangled or suffocated her with a pillow, according to court documents.
After the child died, Mr. Jones stole Mr. Weaver’s gun collection, grabbed the keys to the grandmother’s car, went to the garage, found Mr. Weaver, and again hit him, this time until he died. After putting the firearms in the car, Mr. Jones fled.
The public defender assigned to Mr. Jones’s case had been an attorney for three years but had never been lead attorney in a capital case. Mr. Jones was convicted of killing Mr. Weaver and his daughter and for the attempted murder of the grandmother.
Following the convictions, the public defender visited Mr. Jones’s mother and second stepfather in the search for potentially mitigating evidence for the sentencing hearing.
At the sentencing hearing, the attorney presented testimony from an investigator and the stepfather. The investigator testified about an accomplice allegedly involved in the crimes. The stepfather testified that Mr. Jones’s mother gave birth to Mr. Jones when she was 15 years old and had complications during the pregnancy and delivery.
He also said Mr. Jones had experienced several head injuries when he was growing up and that his personality began to change drastically when he was 13 or 14 years old. Mr. Jones began lying, skipping classes at school, drinking, and using drugs. His first stepfather had introduced him to marijuana when he was about 10 years old, and by the time he was 17, he was an alcoholic.
But in December 1993, Mr. Jones was sentenced to death.
The Ninth Circuit previously ordered that Mr. Jones be given a new sentencing hearing, but the Supreme Court overturned that decision in 2011.
A federal district court denied Mr. Jones’s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel during the sentencing process.
Then, last year, a divided Ninth Circuit applied the standards laid down by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and reversed that decision, without giving deference to the district court’s detailed factual findings. The circuit court held that Mr. Jones’s sentence may have been different if his lawyer had produced evidence that his medical problems had left him mentally impaired.
The legal issue here was whether the Ninth Circuit violated the Supreme Court’s 1984 ruling in Strickland v. Washington, which held that to make out a claim for ineffective counsel, it must be shown that the defense attorney was objectively deficient and that there was a reasonable likelihood that a different outcome would have followed if a competent attorney had represented the accused person.
The new majority opinion by Justice Alito was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
When considering the resentencing of a defendant who “committed three gruesome killings, including the cold-blooded murder of a 7-year-old girl” in order to steal a gun collection worth $2,000 so he could finance a trip to Las Vegas, the Ninth Circuit “all but ignored the strong aggravating circumstances in this case,” Justice Alito wrote.
The circuit court’s determination that the defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights were violated during the sentencing phase of the trial “substantially departed from the well-established standard articulated by this Court in Strickland v. Washington[.]”
Strickland requires a defendant to demonstrate that counsel provided a “deficient” performance that “prejudiced” him. When an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim is posited on counsel’s performance during the sentencing process in a capital case, a defendant is only deemed prejudiced if “there is a reasonable probability that, absent [counsel’s] errors, the sentencer … would have concluded that the balance of aggravating and mitigating circumstances did not warrant death,” Justice Alito wrote.
The Ninth Circuit deviated from Strickland in three ways. First, it failed to adequately take into account the “weighty aggravating circumstances” of the case.
Second, the circuit court applied a “strange” and “clearly unsound” circuit rule that prohibits a court in a Strickland case from assessing the relative strength of expert witness testimony.
Third, the circuit court found that the district court erred by “attaching diminished persuasive value to Jones’s mental health conditions because it saw no link between those conditions and Jones’s conduct when he committed the three murders,” the justice wrote.
If the Ninth Circuit had performed the analysis required by Strickland, “it would have had no choice but to affirm the decision of the District Court[.]”
The Supreme Court reversed the circuit court’s judgment and remanded the case “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, which Justice Elena Kagan joined.
Justice Sotomayor wrote she agreed with the majority that the Ninth Circuit “all but ignored the strong aggravating circumstances in this case.”
But the majority was wrong to reweigh the massive accumulation of evidence in aggravation by itself. The majority should not have parsed “a complex record containing contested medical diagnoses and disputed allegations of abuse and trauma,” she wrote.
“It is not the Court’s usual practice to adjudicate either legal or predicate factual questions in the first instance,” the justice wrote, citing precedent.
Justice Sotomayor wrote that she would have vacated the Ninth Circuit’s judgment and remanded the case to that court “to consider the full record in the first instance[.]”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson filed her own dissenting opinion, in which she stated that the Ninth Circuit’s “analysis satisfied its obligations” under Strickland.
“I agree with Justice Sotomayor that we are not the right tribunal to parse the extensive factual record in this case in the first instance. That is doubly true where the Ninth Circuit committed no legal error in reviewing that record to begin with.”
