Opinion ID: 612544
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Reweighing the Mitigating and Aggravating Factors

Text: Although Foust's childhood was the subject of testimony at the mitigation hearing, the Supreme Court has never limited the prejudice inquiry under Strickland to cases in which there was only `little or no mitigation evidence' presented at the mitigation hearing. Sears v. Upton, 561 U.S. ___, 130 S.Ct. 3259, 3266, 177 L.Ed.2d 1025 (2010). The Supreme Court, in fact, has found prejudice in cases in which counsel presented a superficially reasonable mitigation theory during the penalty phase but later evidence revealed counsel's failings. Id. at 3266. In this case, counsel presented some evidence at the mitigation hearing, but the evidence in no way conveyed the horror of Foust's childhood or Foust's attempt to combat his family history by helping Amy. By 1988, a social worker concluded that [t]he Foust family has a continuous social services history of mental neglect, non[-]nurturance, drug and alcohol usage, substandard living habitats[,] and an overall defiant, confrontational lifestyle that has developmentally delayed and conceivably retarded any reasonable expectations one ... might wish for the Foust children. App'x Vol. 3 at 1032. This type of evidence reveals far more than minor additional details. Van Hook, 130 S.Ct. at 20. The new information picture[s Foust's] childhood ... very differently from anything defense counsel had seen or heard. Rompilla, 545 U.S. at 390, 125 S.Ct. 2456. Had the full information been available to the three-judge panel who sentenced Foust to death, there is a reasonable probability that one judge would have opted to sentence Foust to life imprisonment. We acknowledge that [t]he aggravating circumstances were, as the state court suggested, overwhelming. Sutton, 645 F.3d at 763. Foust's crime was heinous. Powerful aggravating circumstances, however, do not preclude a finding of prejudice, even when our review is constricted to assessing the reasonableness of how the state court weighed the mitigating and aggravating factors. See, e.g., Mason v. Mitchell, 543 F.3d 766, 769 (6th Cir. 2008) (finding prejudice even though the petitioner raped a woman and beat her to death using a blood-stained board with protruding nails); Jells, 538 F.3d at 484-85 (finding prejudice even though the petitioner abducted a woman and her child, beat the mother to death in front of the child, and dumped her body and abandoned the crying child at a junkyard). The new evidence about Foust's family history is overwhelming, and it undermines reasonable confidence in the reliability of Foust's death sentence.