Counsel's Control over the Presentation of Mitigating Evidence during Capital Sentencing

The Sixth Amendment gives a defendant the right to control his defense and the right to a lawyer's assistance. A lawyer's assistance, however, sometimes interferes with a defendant's control over his case. As a result, the Supreme Court, over time, has had to delineate the spheres of authority that pertain to counsel and defendant respectively. The Court has not yet decisively assigned control over mitigating evidence to either counsel or defendant. This Note argues that counsel should control the presentation of mitigating evidence during capital sentencing. First, and most importantly, decisions concerning the presentation of mitigating evidence are best characterized as strategic, and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel allocates strategic decisions to attorneys. Second, the criminal justice system's need for reliable and legitimate outcomes-a need that reaches its zenith during capital sentencing-outweighs a capital defendant's limited claims to autonomy.IntroductionA guilty verdict changes the rules in a capital trial. Once a court has found a capital defendant guilty, it turns to the question of his1 sentence, and the trial changes form. Floyd Maestas's trial was no different. After a jury found him guilty of aggravated murder in the strangling, stabbing, and stomping death of a seventy-two-year-old woman, as well as the aggravated burglary of an eighty-seven-year-old woman whom he punched in the face,2 the proceedings shifted to the penalty phase to decide whether to put Maestas to death.3 The shiftbrought with it a new array of prosecutorial possibilities. Because the rules of evidence and the Confrontation Clause often do not apply at capital sentencing,4 evidence relating to Maestas's criminal record and criminal propensities, which would have been inadmissible at trial, was presented to the jury.5 The State likewise presented evidence of Maestas's prior crimes that the judge had found too "weak" to admit at trial under the normal rules of evidence.6 Because the Supreme Court condones the use of victim-impact evidence to balance the presentation of mitigating evidence,7 the murder victim's granddaughter testified, recounting how, lacking the money to hire help, she had been forced to clean up her grandmother's blood in the days after the murder.8Maestas's counsel, however, did not present the majority of the mitigating evidence that the victim-impact testimony was meant to balance. When Maestas learned that his counsel planned to call a witness who would testify that she had seen him at seven years old having sex with his fourteen-year-old sister, Maestas requested that his lawyers be removed and that no mitigating evidence be presented.9 He claimed that the proposed testimony was false, and he worried that it would damage his relationship with his family.10 The court found that Maestas's waiver of counsel would not be constitutionally valid, so rather than remove his lawyers, it ordered them to respect Maestas's decisions concerning mitigating evidence.11 As a result, not only did the jury not hear of the sexual episode but it also did not learn that Maestas, at eight years old, had seen the same sister stabbed to death by her boyfriend.12 Moreover, the jury heard nothing of the older boy who sexually abused a six-year-old Maestas or of Maestas's significant cognitive deficiencies. It also heard very little about his childhood poverty.13 In essence, the jury heard only aggravating evidence that would have been inadmissible at trial, and then sentenced Maestas to death.14In at least one respect, Maestas's story is not unusual. Capital defendants often object to the presentation of traumatizing or embarrassing mitigating evidence.15 It remains unsettled, however, whether courts should sustain these objections.16This Note argues that a capital defendant's Sixth Amendment right to control his trial does not extend to strategic decisions concerning the introduction of mitigating evidence during capital sentencing. …