Opinion ID: 1842460
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Other Mental Health Mitigation

Text: Arbelaez also argues that counsel was ineffective in his investigation and presentation of other mental health mitigation evidence during the penalty phase. Aside from the epilepsy evidence, counsel did not present any evidence about Arbelaez's mental health problems, such as his low intelligence and his history of depression. Instead, counsel portrayed Arbelaez as a reliable, hard-working man who was trusted by others and who, before the murder, was a positive contributor to society. Four lay witnesses testified that Arbelaez was a hard worker. The only reference to Arbelaez's intellectual limitations came in the closing argument, where counsel told the jury: [Arbelaez] was 30 years old when he committed the crime, but ask yourself also what was his emotional or mental age.... You were able to listen and observe the man describing what he said he did.... You can decide how well he understood the ramifications and the severity, the moral and legal implications of what he did on that day. Arbelaez contends that, under prevailing professional norms, counsel should have pursued and presented evidence to bolster this undeveloped argument. The trial court disagreed, finding that Arbelaez had demonstrated neither deficient performance nor prejudice. The court concluded that counsel conducted a reasonable investigation as to the Defendant's mental status in preparation for the penalty phase and that Arbelaez had presented no competent evidence ... that the Defendant suffered from any major mental illness ... other than his epilepsy... or that the Defendant is mentally retarded.
We conclude that counsel did not conduct a reasonable investigation of Arbelaez's mental health status. To the contrary, counsel ignored various red flags indicating that Arbelaez could have significant mental health problems. For instance, counsel clearly knew from the competency and sanity evaluation that Arbelaez had low intelligence and a history of depression. The report of Dr. A.M. Castiello, the psychiatrist who conducted the competency and sanity evaluation in 1990, states that [c]linically, the defendant is functioning at a low average intellectual capacity. The report recounts Arbelaez's hospitalization at a Colombian mental hospital and his attempted suicides in Colombia. Counsel received confirmation of these facts from family members. For example, in a letter to counsel shortly before the penalty phase, Arbelaez's mother wrote that he is not normal and described how, as a youth, Arbelaez wanted to die, once ingested rat poison, and was repeatedly treated at mental hospitals. Although counsel denied receiving any indication from Dr. Castiello, Arbelaez, or his family members that his client was mentally retarded, he admitted at the evidentiary hearing that I would not say... that [Arbelaez] is an intelligent man and that it was entirely possible ... that someone could have something wrong with them and I would not see it. Despite the overt indications of Arbelaez's low intelligence and his history of depression, counsel did not arrange a mental health evaluation of Arbelaez for purposes of mitigation. Nor did counsel recall asking Arbelaez's initial defense attorney if any mental health work had been done before his involvement. Had he asked, counsel would have learned that Dr. Merry Haber evaluated Arbelaez briefly in 1988 and 1989 at the request of prior counsel. Dr. Haber concluded that Arbelaez suffered from depression and had very limited intelligence. While admitting that she did not find anything that [she] felt at that time required further evaluation and that she would not have thought about an IQ test, Dr. Haber testified at the evidentiary hearing that because [Arbelaez] had a seizure disorder, [she] probably would have recommended a neuro-psychological evaluation if contacted by counsel before trial. Such a recommendation would have pushed counsel in the same direction as the information from Dr. Castiello and Arbelaez's family members  that is, toward a mental health evaluation for purposes of mitigation. The lack of a serious and sustained effort by counsel to pursue mental health mitigation, despite various red flags indicating Arbelaez's low intelligence and his history of depression, amounted to deficient performance. Although we have not required a mental health evaluation for mitigation purposes in every capital case, see Sweet v. State, 810 So.2d 854 (Fla.2002); Rutherford v. State, 727 So.2d 216 (Fla.1998), when available information indicates that the defendant could have significant mental health problems, such an evaluation is fundamental in defending against the death penalty. Bruno v. State, 807 So.2d 55, 74 (Fla.2001) (Anstead, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). This remains true even when the mental health problems do not appear to rise quite to the level of mental retardation. See, e.g., Crook v. State, 813 So.2d 68, 76 (Fla.2002) (We have ... elected to ... treat low intelligence as a significant mitigating factor with the lower scores indicating the greater mitigating influence.). A competency and sanity evaluation as superficial as the one Dr. Castiello performed for Arbelaez obviously cannot serve as a reliable substitute for a thorough mitigation evaluation. See Rutherford, 727 So.2d at 222 n. 3 (We of course recognize that competency evaluations are different from mitigation evaluations, and in no way mean to imply here that one can necessarily take the place of the other.). To conform to the prevailing norms of the legal profession, counsel should have arranged a mental health evaluation for mitigation purposes. See Pietri v. State, 885 So.2d 245 (Fla.2004) (Counsel contacted at least five experts, and ultimately produced [two] at trial.... This is not a situation in which defense counsel did nothing to secure a mental health expert to evaluate his client. Here defense counsel made a reasonable effort.). Arbelaez has therefore satisfied his burden of showing that counsel's performance in investigating and presenting Arbelaez's mental health problems was unreasonable under prevailing professional norms. Valle, 778 So.2d at 965.
Although we conclude that counsel's performance was deficient, Arbelaez nevertheless failed to prove prejudice. Arbelaez confessed to, and was convicted of, killing a five-year-old boy to exact revenge on his former girlfriend. The trial court found that the murder was cold, calculated, and premeditated, as well as especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel. The jury recommended a death sentence by a vote of eleven to one. To undermine confidence in the outcome of his penalty phase, Arbelaez would have to present fairly strong evidence of mental health mitigation. For instance, [w]e have held that a new sentencing hearing is warranted `in cases which entail psychiatric examinations so grossly insufficient that they ignore clear indications of either mental retardation or organic brain damage.' Rose v. State, 617 So.2d 291, 295 (Fla.1993) (quoting State v. Sireci, 502 So.2d 1221, 1224 (Fla.1987)). Arbelaez did not demonstrate at the evidentiary hearing that he suffers from mental retardation, organic brain damage, or any other major mental illness aside from epilepsy. Arbelaez's strongest evidence of mental health mitigation is that he is of low intelligence (but has a high level of adaptive functioning) and that he was hospitalized with severe depression before moving to the United States (but was never treated or hospitalized for depression during the decade before the murder). This evidence is not strong enough to shake our confidence in the outcome. Arbelaez has not shown a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different. Valle, 778 So.2d at 966. At the evidentiary hearing, Arbelaez presented evidence that he is mentally retarded. Dr. Ruth Latterner, a neuropsychologist who evaluated him after his direct appeal, testified that he suffers not only from epilepsy, but also from mental retardation and organic brain damage. She testified that Arbelaez has a full-scale IQ score of 67, placing him in the range of educable mentally retarded, and that his language skills place him between a first- and a third-grade level. These conditions, she testified, pre-existed her evaluation. Dr. Latterner was the only expert witness who testified unambiguously that Arbelaez has mental retardation or organic brain damage. The trial court rejected Dr. Latterner's testimony as having little if any evidentiary value as it is refuted by other mental health professionals and other evidence, and is otherwise wholly unbelievable. The court emphasized that Dr. Latterner admitted on cross-examination that, in reaching her finding of mental retardation, she looked only at testing results and refuse[d] to consider Arbelaez's ability to adapt to his surroundings, even though section 916.106(12), Florida Statutes (2003), defines mental retardation as necessarily including deficits in adaptive behavior. The court also emphasized that Dr. Latterner refused to consider the possibility that Arbelaez's difficult experiences on death row might have negatively impacted his intellectual functioning and thus his testing results. If they had, the court implied, then Dr. Latterner's findings from 1995 would not accurately reflect Arbelaez's mental condition at the time of the penalty phase in 1991. The trial court found that the testimony of two other mental health professionals, Dr. Sonia Ruiz and Dr. Haber, conclusively refute[d] that of Dr. Latterner. Dr. Ruiz, a clinical psychologist who evaluated Arbelaez at the State's request in 2001, testified that Arbelaez has no mental retardation or any major thought disturbance [or] psychosis whatsoever. She acknowledged that Arbelaez's testing performances, if analyzed independently, revealed a borderline level of mental retardation. However, unlike Dr. Latterner, Dr. Ruiz also considered Arbelaez's ability to adapt to his surroundings. She testified that Arbelaez's adaptive level of functioning was quite high [so] that you cannot label him as mentally retarded. This assessment was echoed, to some extent, by Dr. Haber, who testified for the defense that Arbelaez has very limited intelligence and is at least close to being mildly mentally retarded, but also acknowledged that Arbelaez had adapted to his environment and appeared to be functioning behaviorally within an adequate range. In fact, Dr. Haber admitted that she would not have thought about an IQ test based on her brief pretrial evaluations in 1988 and 1989. The trial court's decision to assign greater weight to the comparatively modest assessments of Dr. Ruiz and Dr. Haber than it assigned to the uncorroborated findings of Dr. Latterner was based on competent, substantial evidence and thus warrants deference on appeal. Sochor, 883 So.2d at 781. This Court will not substitute its judgment for that of the circuit court on questions of fact and, likewise, on the credibility of the witnesses and weight to be given to the evidence. Id. Because Arbelaez failed to present competent, substantial evidence that he suffers from mental retardation or major mental illness, his claim now rests upon the uncontested evidence of his low intelligence and his struggles with depression in Colombia, including his suicide attempts. Arbelaez contends that this evidence might have altered the outcome of his penalty phase. We disagree. The jury heard plenty of evidence from which to arrive at a rough estimate of Arbelaez's low intelligence level. Arbelaez testified during the guilt phase of the trial and claimed that the boy's death was an accidental drowning, despite the strong physical evidence of strangulation. The State discredited Arbelaez's testimony by introducing a videotaped confession in which Arbelaez recounted the facts of the crime in detail, making it clear that the crime was both premeditated and deliberate. The jury therefore knew that Arbelaez had enough intelligence to plan and remember the details of the murder, as well as enough intelligence to concoct a patently false story to explain the boy's death. In fact, counsel appealed to the jury during the penalty phase's closing argument to reflect on what Arbelaez's testimony revealed about his intellectual limitations: [A]sk yourself ... what was [Arbelaez's] emotional or mental age.... You were able to listen and observe the man describing what he said he did. This case is comparable to White v. State, 664 So.2d 242 (Fla.1995), where we stated: [T]rial counsel's performance was not rendered deficient by his failure to present to the jury data concerning White's low IQ as evidenced in the PSI report. The trial record contains extensive evidence documenting the deliberate nature of White's actions before, during, and after the crime. White himself took the stand and gave a detailed account of the crime and his actions. Id. at 244-45. Although we believe that expert testimony relating to Arbelaez's low intelligence would have been vastly preferable and that counsel was deficient in failing to arrange for such testimony, we are confident that the presentation of such testimony would not have changed the outcome. Given that the jury listened to Arbelaez's testimony and also heard him explain on videotape how he executed a premeditated murder of a five-year-old boy to exact revenge on his former girlfriend, we do not believe that expert testimony about Arbelaez's intellectual limitations, short of mental retardation or major mental illness, would have altered the jury's perceptions to such an extent that it would have been swayed from its nearly unanimous recommendation of death. See Damren v. State, 838 So.2d 512, 517 (Fla.2003) (concluding that counsel was not ineffective in failing to present evidence of minimal brain damage, in light of the strong [CCP, HAC, and contemporaneous violent felony] aggravating factors which were present); Sweet, 810 So.2d at 866 (concluding that mitigation evidence of the defendant's low-average IQ and his personality disorder would not have led to the imposition of a sentence other than death, given the four strong aggravators in the case); Brown v. State, 755 So.2d 616 (Fla.2000) (concluding that mitigation evidence of the defendant's low intelligence would not have altered the outcome of the trial, given the presence of strong aggravating factors); Haliburton v. Singletary, 691 So.2d 466, 471 (Fla.1997) (holding that [i]n light of the substantial, compelling aggravation found by the trial court, there is no reasonable probability that had the mental health expert testified [to his finding of a `strong indication of brain damage'], the outcome would have been different). Evidence of Arbelaez's struggles in Colombia with depression would have been equally unlikely to sway the jury. Counsel for Arbelaez admitted at oral argument that Arbelaez's suicide attempts and his hospitalization for severe depression all occurred before he moved to Florida as a young man. During the more than ten years that Arbelaez spent outside of Colombia before committing murder at age 31, Arbelaez just had everyday problems. He was neither hospitalized nor treated for depression. He held numerous jobs and, by all accounts, learned to live independently despite his intellectual limitations. This case is therefore not one in which the defendant could have shown that he was struggling with severe depression and was contemplating suicide around the time of the crime. Rather, Arbelaez struggled with these problems during his youth, more than a decade before the crime, and apparently found a way to control them as an adult. Again, this potential mitigation evidence is not strong enough to shake our confidence in the outcome of Arbelaez's penalty phase. Arbelaez was found to have committed a revenge murder of a young boy in a manner that was cold, calculated, and premeditated, as well as especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel. The jury recommended a sentence of death by a vote of eleven to one. Evidence that Arbelaez was hospitalized for severe depression as a youth but then did not require treatment or hospitalization for depression at any point during the decade leading up to the murder would not have been nearly enough to counterbalance the powerful aggravating factors in this case. See Breedlove v. State, 692 So.2d 874, 878 (Fla.1997) (finding no prejudice because the case's strong aggravating factors would have overwhelm[ed] mitigation evidence of the defendant's history of drug addiction and his troubled childhood); Tompkins v. Dugger, 549 So.2d 1370, 1373 (Fla.1989), cert. denied, 493 U.S. 1093, 110 S.Ct. 1170, 107 L.Ed.2d 1073 (1990) (same); Buenoano v. Dugger, 559 So.2d 1116, 1119 (Fla.1990) (In our opinion the mitigation evidence ... in no way would be sufficient to overcome the overwhelming evidence presented against [the defendant] at trial.... We do not believe the unfortunate circumstances of Buenoano's childhood are so grave nor her emotional problems so extreme as to outweigh, under any view, the four applicable aggravating circumstances.).