Opinion ID: 2743618
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Offense and Trial

Text: The instant appeal is the latest chapter in this case’s long and complex history. The facts of the underlying crime are straightforward. As described by the U.S. Supreme Court in Clark’s direct appeal: In the early hours of June 21, 2000, Officer Jeffrey Moritz of the Flagstaff Police responded in uniform to complaints that a pickup truck with loud music blaring was circling a residential block. When he located the truck, the officer turned on the emergency lights and siren of his marked patrol car, which prompted petitioner Eric Clark, the truck’s driver (then 17), to pull over. Officer Moritz got out of the patrol car and told Clark to stay where he was. Less than a minute later, Clark shot the officer, who died soon after but not before calling the police dispatcher for help. Clark ran away on foot but was arrested later that day with gunpowder residue on his hands; the gun that killed the officer was found nearby, stuffed into a knit cap. Clark v. Arizona, 548 U.S. 735, 743 (2006). CLARK V. ARNOLD 5 Clark was charged with first-degree murder for intentionally or knowingly killing a law enforcement officer in the line of duty under Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 13- 1105(A)(3).1 Independent psychological experts appointed by the court deemed him incompetent to stand trial. The parties subsequently stipulated to Clark’s incompetence.
Clark underwent treatment to restore competency at a state hospital beginning in April 2001. In October 2001, Arizona State Hospital evaluator Edward Jasinski, Ph.D., concluded “to a reasonable degree of psychological certainty that[] Mr. Clark is competent to stand trial.” He deemed any lack of cooperation between Clark and his evaluators “volitional.” Court-appointed doctors came to similar conclusions. M.B. Kassell, M.D., wrote in November 2001 that Clark was “at this time . . . quite [c]ompetent.” John P. DiBacco, Ph.D., wrote that at that time Clark was “competent to stand trial and, more specifically, can assist his attorney in his own defense as well as understand the process to the extent necessary.” Competency hearings followed in the summer of 2002. Drs. DiBacco, Kassell, and Jasinski testified that Clark was competent and that any failure to cooperate with his attorney was volitional. Clark’s expert, Susan Parrish, Ph.D., disagreed with this finding, writing that Clark “can’t fully appreciate the situation,” and that any failure to work with his 1 Section 13–1105(A)(3) provides that “[a] person commits first degree murder if . . . [i]ntending or knowing that the person’s conduct will cause death to a law enforcement officer, the person causes the death of a law enforcement officer who is in the line of duty.” 6 CLARK V. ARNOLD lawyers “is not volitional.” The court considered all the evidence and ordered Clark readmitted to the hospital in September 2002 and ordered periodic reports from his doctors. Drs. Kassell and Jasinski submitted further reports attesting to Clark’s competence.2 Barry Morenz, M.D., another expert retained by Clark, provided an assessment in April 2003, concluding that Clark “does have some cognitive awareness of his current legal predicament” and he “could be considered marginally competent to stand trial but his competency would have to be considered qualified.” He noted that injections of an antipsychotic drug called Haldol “are probably helping him, at least to some degree . . . ,” but it was “not clear that Mr. Clark can rationally assist his attorney in his own defense since Mr. Clark has yet to have a rational conversation with his attorney about his case. To conclude that Mr. Clark is clearly competent would imply that Mr. Clark is malingering,” which Dr. Morenz called “possible” but “not likely.” In May 2003, after reviewing “the records submitted by Dr. Kassel, Dr. DiBacco, Dr. Morenz, and Dr. Jasinski and all other information,” the court concluded that Clark was “competent to stand [t]rial, understands the proceedings, and if he chooses, can assist his attorney in his defense. The Defendant’s status, at this time, is one of volition, as opposed 2 Jasinski noted that Clark “ask[ed] questions about civil commitments, GEI [guilty except for insanity], and prison sentences” and “wanted to know where you would have to serve the longest sentence and if you were under a civil commitment, would your charges be dropped.” Clark later told Jasinski: “I’m charged with murdering a police officer, but I am innocent.” Jasinski wrote Clark “does have a good understanding of his legal situation, does have an awareness of various legal options in this case, and in fact is weighting various options.” CLARK V. ARNOLD 7 to any inability.” The bench trial began on August 5, 2003, and lasted eleven days. On the seventh day of the trial, Clark’s attorney, Byron Middlebrook, told the judge that he and co-counsel David Goldberg “have some concerns that [Clark] may not be following what’s occurring in court” and said that there was “some concern about making sure that [he] gets medicated and stuff. And I will be the first to admit that we have kind of let that drop off. . . . [W]e probably need to get him medicated. We’re getting a little concerned that he’s not following.” The court said it would contact the jail to make sure it was aware of a court order requiring that Clark be given his medication, specifically Haldol, even involuntarily. This colloquy is the extent of any concerns raised during trial about Clark’s mental health.
Arizona’s traditional approach to the insanity defense was adapted from M’Naghten’s Case, (1843) 8 Eng. Rep. 718 (Q.B.), the single most influential articulation of the common law insanity defense.3 In that case, in 1843, Daniel 3 See Renée Melançon, Note, Arizona’s Insane Response to Insanity, 40 Ariz. L. Rev. 287, 294 (1998) [hereinafter Response to Insanity] (“Arizona’s original insanity defense statute was basically the M’Naghten test.”); see also Durham v. United States, 214 F.2d 862, 869 (D.C. Cir. 1954), abrogated on other grounds by United States v. Brawner, 471 F.2d 969 (D.C. Cir. 1972) (“[T]he House of Lords in the famous M’Naghten case restated what had become the accepted ‘right-wrong’ test in a form which has since been followed, not only in England but in most American jurisdictions as an exclusive test of criminal responsibility.”) (footnotes omitted); Wayne R. LaFave, 1 Subst. Crim. L. § 7.2 (2d ed.) (“In a majority of the jurisdictions in this country, what is most often referred to 8 CLARK V. ARNOLD M’Naghten shot and killed Edward Drummond, the secretary to Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, believing that Drummond was Peel. See id. at 719; Fradella, From Insanity, at 15. M’Naghten was under the delusion that Peel was persecuting him, and he was acquitted of murder on the ground of insanity. Subsequently, the House of Lords put several questions relating to insanity to English judges. See M’Naghten, 8 Eng. Rep. at 720. The judges’ answers became known as the M’Naghten Rules, the most important of which provided: [T]o establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong. Id. at 722. as the M’Naghten rule has long been accepted as the test to be applied for the defense of insanity.”); Henry F. Fradella, From Insanity to Beyond Diminished Capacity: Mental Illness and Criminal Excuse in the Post-Clark Era, 18 U. Fla. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 7, 15 (2007) [hereinafter From Insanity] (“In 1843, the M’Naghten case set forth a legal standard for insanity that many U.S. jurisdictions still use today.”) (footnotes omitted); cf. Clark, 548 U.S. at 749 (“Even a cursory examination of the traditional Anglo-American approaches to insanity reveals significant differences among them, with four traditional strains variously combined to yield a diversity of American standards[,]” although the first two strains “emanate from the alternatives stated in the M’Naghten rule.”). CLARK V. ARNOLD 9 M’Naghten essentially established a two pronged insanity defense. The first, the cognitive incapacity prong, asks whether a mental defect left a defendant at the time of the act unable to understand what he was doing—to form the requisite mens rea of the crime charged. See Clark, 548 U.S. at 747; Fradella, From Insanity, at 18 (“The cognitive incapacity part of the test relieves the defendant of liability when the defendant is incapable of forming mens rea.”). If, for example, “in crushing the skull of a human being with an iron bar, [a person] believed that he was smashing a glass jar,” he would be deemed insane under the cognitive incapacity prong of M’Naghten. 2 Wharton’s Crim. L. § 101 (15th ed.); see also Fradella, From Insanity, at 18 (“For example, if a man strangled another person believing that he was squeezing the juice out of a lemon, he did not understand the nature and quality of his act.”). The second prong, called the moral incapacity prong, asks whether a mental disease or defect left the defendant unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his act. See Clark, 548 U.S. at 747. In that circumstance, the defendant “knew what he was doing; he knew that he was crushing the skull of a human being with an iron bar. However, because of mental disease, he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. He believed, for example, that he was carrying out a command from God.” 2 Wharton’s Crim. L. § 101. In that example, the defendant would have satisfied the cognitive capacity prong—because he had the mens rea for he knew he was crushing a human skull with intent to kill—but he could be adjudged insane because he did not think his doing so was wrong given the context. See Fradella, From Insanity, at 18 (describing this prong of M’Naghten as “usually at the crux of an insanity defense”). 10 CLARK V. ARNOLD Until the early 1990s, Arizona “uniformly adhered” to “the Rule of M’Naghten’s Case as the test for criminal insanity.” State v. Schantz, 403 P.2d 521, 525 (1965) (citing cases from 1921). When Arizona “first codified an insanity rule [in 1978] it adopted the full M’Naghten statement.” Clark, 548 U.S. at 747. The 1978 law read in relevant part: A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct the person was suffering from such a mental disease or defect as not to know the nature and quality of the act or, if such person did know, that such person did not know that what he was doing was wrong. Id. at 747–48 (quoting Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 13–502 (West 1978)). But in 1993, after a defendant in a highly publicized murder trial was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was later released, Arizona’s legislature changed the insanity defense and adopted a much more restrictive version of the test. Melançon, Response to Insanity, at 290. The new law did not include a “cognitive incapacity” provision; it left only the second prong of the M’Naghten test, the so-called moral incapacity test: A person may be found guilty except insane if at the time of the commission of the criminal act the person was afflicted with a mental disease or defect of such severity that the person did not know the criminal act was wrong. A mental disease or defect constituting legal insanity is an affirmative CLARK V. ARNOLD 11 defense. Mental disease or defect does not include disorders that result from acute voluntary intoxication or withdrawal from alcohol or drugs, character defects, psychosexual disorders or impulse control disorders. Conditions that do not constitute legal insanity include but are not limited to momentary, temporary conditions arising from the pressure of the circumstances, moral decadence, depravity or passion growing out of anger, jealousy, revenge, hatred or other motives in a person who does not suffer from a mental disease or defect or an abnormality that is manifested only by criminal conduct. Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 13-502(A). In State v. Mott, 931 P.2d 1046 (Ariz. 1997), the Arizona Supreme Court addressed what kind of evidence could be admitted at trial to negate specific intent under the new law. Mott concerned expert evidence on battered woman syndrome (“BWS”). 931 P.2d at 1049. The defendant was convicted of two counts of child abuse and first-degree murder and sought to introduce testimony from an expert on BWS to show that the defendant’s mental capacity negated the specific intent necessary to “knowingly or intentionally” commit child abuse. Id. The trial court denied the admission of such evidence, but the appellate court reversed. The Arizona Supreme Court reversed again. Id. Reviewing the Arizona insanity defense statute, the court concluded that the legislature’s rejection of a diminished capacity defense (the cognitive prong) was also a bar on “evidence of a defendant’s mental disorder short of insanity either as an affirmative 12 CLARK V. ARNOLD defense or to negate the mens rea element of a crime.” Id. at 1051. The BWS expert’s “testimony was offered to demonstrate that defendant’s mental incapacity negated specific intent.” Id. at 1054. The court held it was not admissible for that purpose, and “did not meet the standards of the one test for criminal responsibility—the M’Naghten test—that Arizona does follow”—the moral incapacity prong of the test. Id. at 1054–55. “Furthermore, if [the court] adopted the defendant’s position and allowed expert testimony such as this to negate specific intent, the result would be . . . to compel juries to ‘release[ ] upon society many dangerous criminals who obviously should be placed under confinement.’” Id. at 1055 (alteration in original) (citation omitted).4
Clark was tried without a jury. The revised version of the insanity defense, as interpreted by Mott, was the operative law during Clark’s bench trial. After the state presented its case, Clark moved for a directed judgment of acquittal claiming that there was insufficient evidence that he knew the 4 Mott later filed a habeas petition that the Arizona district court granted in an unpublished opinion. Mott v. Stewart, 98-CV-239, 2002 WL 31017646 (D. Ariz. Aug. 30, 2002) (unpublished). The court concluded that “[t]he exclusion of evidence of mental disease or defect offered to negate the specific intent element of an offense or to establish an alternative explanation for a defendant’s conduct is disproportionate to the purposes stated by the court that it was designed to serve.” Id. at . Clark’s trial court did not rely on Mott’s habeas proceeding when it construed Mott, concluding that an unpublished federal opinion was not “the law of the land of the State of Arizona.” CLARK V. ARNOLD 13 officer whom he shot “was actually a police officer and that he was actually intending to kill a police officer,” and not an alien. Clark had told others that he believed that aliens had invaded Flagstaff and were impersonating government agents. In response, the state introduced evidence that the officer displayed all the indicia of the police: he drove a squad car, turned on his lights and sirens, and wore a uniform, and that Clark pulled over as ordered. The court denied the motion. During trial, Clark claimed mental illness and sought to introduce evidence of such illness for two purposes. First, Clark raised the affirmative defense of insanity under Arizona law—that “at the time of the commission of the criminal act [he] was afflicted with a mental disease or defect of such severity that [he] did not know the criminal act was wrong.” Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 13–502(A). Second, he sought to rebut the prosecution’s evidence of the requisite mens rea under the first-degree murder statute, that he had acted intentionally or knowingly to kill a law enforcement officer. See Clark, 548 U.S. at 744. On the second ground, the trial court interpreted Mott as barring evidence of insanity to dispute mens rea, but permitted the evidence to be admitted. The court stated that “after reading all [of] the Mott case,” and recognizing that “all” of the defense counsel’s evidence “has to do with the insanity [claim but] could also arguably be made along the lines of the Mott issues as to form and intent and [Clark’s] capacity for intent,” it would “let [counsel] go ahead and get all that stuff in [the record] because it goes to the insanity issue and because we’re not in front of a jury.” The court added that “[a]t the end, I’ll let [counsel] make an offer of proof as to the intent, the Mott issues, but I still think the 14 CLARK V. ARNOLD [Arizona] supreme court decision [in Mott] is the law of the land in this state.” “I will certainly allow you to preserve the issue, you can argue or not argue, but you can make an offer of proof at the conclusion of the case, but I don’t think it’s the law of the land at this point.” Clark presented significant evidence of his mental state and the nature and effect of his delusions. Witnesses included a psychiatrist as well as “classmates, school officials, and his family [who] describ[ed] his increasingly bizarre behavior over the year before the shooting.” Clark, 548 U.S. at 745. Witnesses testified, for example, that paranoid delusions led Clark to rig a fishing line with beads and wind chimes at home to alert him to intrusion by invaders, and to keep a bird in his automobile to warn of airborne poison. There was lay and expert testimony that Clark thought Flagstaff was populated with “aliens” (some impersonating government agents), the “aliens” were trying to kill him, and bullets were the only way to stop them. A psychiatrist testified that Clark was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with delusions about “aliens” when he killed Officer Moritz, and he concluded that Clark was incapable of luring the officer or understanding right from wrong and that he was thus insane at the time of the killing. In rebuttal, a psychiatrist for the State gave his opinion that Clark’s paranoid schizophrenia did not keep him from appreciating the wrongfulness of his conduct, as shown by his actions before and after the CLARK V. ARNOLD 15 shooting (such as circling the residential block with music blaring as if to lure the police to intervene, evading the police after the shooting, and hiding the gun). Id. At the conclusion of his trial, Clark renewed his motion for a directed verdict, which the court denied. On September 3, 2003, the court rejected Clark’s insanity defense and found him guilty of first-degree murder. The court noted that the case “was well prepared and professionally tried,” and that the “state and the defense were exceedingly well represented in this case.” The court divided its verdict into two parts. First, it “f[ou]nd beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant, Eric Clark, shot and caused the death of police officer, Jeff Moritz.” Second, it noted that Clark had entered a plea of guilty but insane and it asked, (a) whether the defendant was “afflicted with a mental disease or defect,” and—after concluding that he was—asked (b) if that “disease or defect caused him to not know his criminal act was wrong,” as required by Arizona’s moral incapacity test. The court concluded that Clark’s schizophrenia “did not . . . distort his perception of reality so severely that he did not know his actions were wrong.” The court sentenced Clark to life in prison with possible release after twenty-five years. B. Direct Appeal and Clark’s Tripartite Framework On appeal to the Arizona intermediate appellate court, Clark argued “that it was not inconsistent with Mott to consider nonexpert evidence indicating mental illness on the 16 CLARK V. ARNOLD issue of mens rea, and [he] argued that the trial judge had failed to do so.” The State responded that Mott barred “any evidence reflecting upon a mentally ill criminal defendant’s ability to form the necessary mens rea.” In January 2005, the Arizona Court of Appeals affirmed Clark’s conviction and sentence. While it noted that Clark had argued that the court erred in refusing to consider evidence of his mental disease or defect in determining whether he had the requisite mens rea to commit the murder, “the record shows that the trial court did not prevent Clark from presenting such evidence, despite our supreme court’s decision to the contrary in Mott, even going so far as to permit him to make an offer of proof on the issue at the close of the evidence.” However, “[a]side from the evidence offered to prove his insanity generally, Clark specified no evidence in his offer of proof that demonstrated he was not capable of knowing he was killing a police officer.” The appellate court allowed that, “[e]ven assuming such evidence was sufficient, the trial court was bound by the [Arizona] supreme court’s decision in Mott, which held that ‘Arizona does not allow evidence of a defendant’s mental disorder short of insanity either as an affirmative defense or to negate the mens rea element of a crime.’” Arizona v. Clark, 1 CACR 03-0851; 1 CA-CR 03-0985 (Ariz. Ct. App. Jan. 25, 2005) (quoting Mott, 931 P.3d at 1051) The Arizona Supreme Court denied Clark’s petition for review. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to consider, first, “whether due process prohibits Arizona’s use of an insanity test stated solely in terms of the capacity to tell whether an act charged as a crime was right or wrong,” and, second, “whether Arizona violates due process in restricting consideration of defense evidence of mental illness and CLARK V. ARNOLD 17 incapacity to its bearing on a claim of insanity, thus eliminating its significance directly on the issue of the mental element of the crime charged (known in legal shorthand as the mens rea, or guilty mind).” Clark, 548 U.S. at 742. The Court held “there [was] no violation of due process in either instance” and affirmed the conviction. Id. With regard to the second issue, which is at the heart of the instant appeal, the Court described three categories of evidence bearing on insanity: (1) “observation evidence,” (2) “mental-disease evidence,” and (3) “capacity evidence. Id. at 757–59. It defined observation evidence as “testimony from those who observed what Clark did and heard what he said; this category would also include testimony that an expert witness might give about Clark’s tendency to think in a certain way and his behavioral characteristics.” Id. at 757. Such evidence could “support a professional diagnosis of mental disease and in any event is the kind of evidence that can be relevant to show what in fact was on Clark’s mind when he fired the gun.” Id. It “covers Clark’s behavior at home and with friends, his expressions of belief around the time of the killing that ‘aliens’ were inhabiting the bodies of local people (including government agents), his driving around the neighborhood before the police arrived, and so on.” Id. (footnote omitted). Observation evidence can be presented by “either lay or expert witnesses.” Id. at 758. Second, “mental-disease evidence” is “opinion testimony that Clark suffered from a mental disease with features described by the witness.” Id. “As was true here, this evidence characteristically but not always comes from professional psychologists or psychiatrists who testify as 18 CLARK V. ARNOLD expert witnesses and base their opinions in part on examination of a defendant.” Id. Such evidence at trial suggested Clark “fell within the category of schizophrenia.” Id. Third, “capacity evidence” refers to evidence of “a defendant’s capacity for cognition and moral judgment (and ultimately also his capacity to form mens rea).” Such testimony can come from experts and focuses “on those specific details of the mental condition that make the difference between sanity and insanity under the Arizona definition.” Id. The majority noted that these categories went to core differences, not the margins, and reserved decision on the “[e]xact limits” between them. Id. at 759. After describing this taxonomy, the Court interpreted Mott differently than the Arizona Court of Appeals. It read Mott not as an absolute bar on all evidence of mental illness that could negate mens rea, as the Arizona appellate court had, but to bar only so-called mental disease and capacity evidence: “It is clear that Mott itself imposed no restriction on considering evidence of the first sort, the observation evidence.” Id. at 760. The Court faulted Clark’s counsel for failing to recognize that Mott was so limited and for not preserving a claim that the trial court improperly excluded observation evidence. Id. at 764. But even on this central issue, the Court seemed to contradict itself. “In this case,” the Court wrote, “the trial court seems to have applied the Mott restriction to all evidence offered by Clark for the purpose of showing what he called his inability to form the required mens rea.” Id. at 760 (citation omitted). But that was not clear: “[T]he trial court’s restriction may have covered not only mental-disease and CLARK V. ARNOLD 19 capacity evidence . . . but also observation evidence offered by lay (and expert) witnesses who described Clark’s unusual behavior.” Id. Later, the Court asserted more forcefully that “[a]t no point did the trial judge specify any particular evidence that he refused to consider on the mens rea issue.” Id. at 763. Finally, the Court concluded: “In sum, the trial court’s ruling, with its uncertain edges, may have restricted observation evidence admissible on mens rea to the insanity defense alone, but we cannot be sure.” Id. at 764–65. Nevertheless, it deemed a due process challenge to “a restriction of observation evidence . . . neither pressed nor passed” below, so it did not consider it. Id. at 765.5 It went on to consider Clark’s claim that his due process rights were violated by “Arizona’s prohibition of diminished capacity evidence by criminal defendants”—not on observation evidence. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). The court concluded that Mott’s (limited) restrictions were permissible. Id. at 770. The three-part evidentiary categorization the Court created was a novel invention.6 The dissent criticized it as a 5 The dissent was more assertive, writing that the trial court’s ruling and the terms of the verdict lead to the conclusion that the “most reasonable assumption, then would seem to be that the trial court did not consider [all evidence offered by Clark on his inability to form mens rea], and the Court does not hold otherwise.” Clark, 548 U.S. at 784 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). 6 See Susan D. Rozelle, Fear and Loathing in Insanity Law: Explaining the Otherwise Inexplicable Clark v. Arizona, 58 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 19, 44 (2007) (“[T]he Court’s breakdown of relevant evidence into 20 CLARK V. ARNOLD “restructured evidentiary universe, with no convincing authority to support it” and claimed it was “unworkable on its own terms.” Id. at 781 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). It criticized the Court for “refus[ing] to consider the key part of Clark’s claim because his counsel did not predict the Court’s own invention. It is unrealistic, and most unfair, to hold that Clark’s counsel erred in failing to anticipate so novel an approach.” Id. at 781–82.7 C. Post-Conviction Relief Proceedings 1. State Court In September 2006, Clark filed a petition for postconviction relief in state court asserting five ineffectiveassistance-of-counsel claims. The Arizona trial court denied all of Clark’s claims. As pertinent to our review, it held that Clark’s trial counsel was not ineffective when they did not raise the issue of competency after Clark had already been found competent. While Clark’s counsel testified in a postconviction hearing that he thought Clark may have been incompetent when he stopped drawing nonsensical symbols and appeared to sleep during part of the trial, the court held that “[m]inimal attorney competence does not place upon an observational, mental-disease, and capacity categories has no basis in anything that has come before.”). 7 Justice Breyer’s concurrence “agree[d] with the Court’s basic categorization” but allowed that “the distinction among these kinds of evidence will be unclear in some cases.” Id. at 780 (Breyer, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). He favored remanding the case to the Arizona courts to “determine whether Arizona law, as set forth in Mott and other cases, is consistent with the distinction the Court draws and whether the trial court so applied Arizona law here.” Id. CLARK V. ARNOLD 21 attorney a duty to rely on subjective personal opinions about a defendant’s mental state, disregarding the opinions of numerous mental health experts.” It also held that Middlebrook was not deficient for not seeking a competency reevaluation based on a test by one of Clark’s psychiatrists that was of “questionable methodology.” The court additionally held that trial counsel was not ineffective for not preserving an observation evidence claim in light of the Supreme Court’s disagreement on the issue. “Where arguably, three of the best legal minds in our country disagree with five others, finding that petitioner preserved his claim, this Court is hard pressed to find an ineffective assistance of counsel claim,” it wrote. Because it held that Clark’s counsel rendered adequate performance, the court did not address prejudice on either claim. The Arizona Court of Appeals and Arizona Supreme Court denied further review. 2. Federal District Court In June 2009, Clark filed a federal habeas petition asserting the following grounds for relief: (1) there was insufficient evidence to support Clark’s conviction for firstdegree murder; (2) the trial court’s conclusion that Clark was not insane at the time of the offense was unreasonable; (3) Clark’s sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment; (4) Clark was not competent to stand trial or waive his right to a jury trial; (5) Clark’s trial counsel was ineffective for various reasons, including not preserving an “observation evidence” claim and not re-raising the issue of competency during trial; (6) the prosecutor engaged in misconduct by not advising the trial court of the need for a competency hearing regarding waiving a jury trial; and 22 CLARK V. ARNOLD (7) Clark’s appellate counsel was ineffective for not raising a competency claim and an observational-evidence claim. a. Magistrate Judge’s Report and Recommendation In November 2011, the magistrate judge issued a Report and Recommendation (“R&R”) recommending that Clark be granted habeas release on his claim that his trial counsel rendered ineffective assistance of counsel by failing to preserve an observational evidence claim. The R&R found that the remainder of Petitioner’s claims were either procedurally defaulted or without merit. The magistrate’s R&R concluded that, even before the Supreme Court’s decision in Clark, Mott did not exclude the entire field of evidence—expert psychological evidence, diminished capacity evidence, and what we now call observation evidence—and that Clark’s counsel rendered deficient performance when they failed to recognize that and make an offer of proof, prejudicing Clark. b. District Court Ruling The district court disagreed with the R&R’s resolution of the observation-evidence claim, and concluded that Clark’s trial counsel was not ineffective for not preserving an observational-evidence claim, and, even if his counsel did render deficient performance, Clark failed to establish he was prejudiced. The district court held that all the relevant evidence was admitted by the trial court, although perhaps not considered, and that there was no excluded evidence on which the counsel could have made an offer of proof. Furthermore, it held that Clark’s counsel raised the mens rea issue “generally with the trial court, and then felt bound to abide by the trial court’s ruling that he could not use this CLARK V. ARNOLD 23 evidence to negate mens rea other than to preserve the underlying evidence for appeal.” Accordingly, the court found the performance of Clark’s counsel adequate. And while it did not need to reach the prejudice prong, the court opined that Clark would have suffered no prejudice even if the evidence had been omitted in light of the State’s overwhelming evidence establishing the requisite mens rea.8 Clark timely appealed.