Opinion ID: 2790291
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Psychological Experts

Text: J.B. did retain a psychologist, Dr. M.R., to interview Doe. She had the professional expertise necessary to discover and present the compelling mitigating testimony regarding Doe’s mental health that went unheard at trial, but she was limited by the terms of her engagement. J.B. hired her, she reported, only to determine whether any mental state defenses based on “obvious signs of mental impairment” could be mounted at the guilt phase of the trial. Dr. M.R. reported that she “was not asked to do more,” and that she “was not asked to provide expert assistance in preparing or presenting a mitigation case at the penalty trial.”17 In addition to having a limited scope, the investigation that Dr. M.R. conducted was abbreviated. She was paid only for twelve and a half hours of her time and met with Doe only once, for an hour-long session largely devoted to filling out a questionnaire and discussing his criminal record. In her 17 The state contends that Dr. M.R. was in fact retained for the purpose of developing a mitigation case at the penalty phase. When asked whether he actually told her to conduct a penalty-phase investigation, J.B. testified: “I don’t recall exactly what I told her. But I did tell her that it was a capital case and that I was looking into all issues with regard to [Doe].” J.B. may have told Dr. M.R. that he was looking into “all issues,” but he did not tell her to look into “all issues.” No one else was looking into Doe’s mental health, either; J.B. did not recall having investigated, or having asked D.S. to investigate, whether Doe had ever received psychological treatment. 30 DOE V. AYERS report to J.B., Dr. M.R. described her work as a “relatively brief evaluation,” and described her conclusions as “initial clinical impressions.” It appears that J.B. never spoke with Dr. M.R. after he initially hired her. The only background materials he provided her were police reports.18 When she left a message saying that she had “no documents on background,” he did not bother to return her call.19 18 Dr. M.R. noted this deficiency in her report, stating: “If . . . there is further information that the defense counsel wishes to bring to my attention in order to evaluate [Doe] further, I shall be happy to do so.” Contrary to the state’s contention, Dr. M.R. made clear that the life history she considered was “provided” by Doe himself during their interview, not by D.S. 19 Providing psychological experts with the background material necessary for them to competently and correctly evaluate defendants is critical, and when such information is requested by an expert, as here, the failure to provide it constitutes deficient performance. When no background information is made available, experts may conclude that further investigation will not be fruitful, just as Dr. M.R. did here. See Rompilla, 545 U.S. at 392 (“The jury never heard any of this and neither did the mental health experts who examined [the defendant] before trial. While they found ‘nothing helpful to [his] case,’ their postconviction counterparts, alerted by information from school, medical, and prison records that trial counsel never saw, found plenty of ‘red flags’ pointing up a need to test further.” (citations omitted)); Silva v. Woodford, 279 F.3d 825, 842–43 (9th Cir. 2002) (“In Bloom v. Calderon, 132 F.3d 1267 (9th Cir. 1997), a case with several important parallels to this one, we also found that a trial attorney’s failure to obtain and prepare a psychiatric witness was constitutionally deficient. . . . [H]is trial counsel . . . failed to provide him with necessary and available data which would have assisted the expert in his subsequent evaluation and trial testimony-including an outline of the theory of defense. As a result, the psychiatrist, who constituted the sole defense expert witness, produced a severely damaging psychiatric report which the prosecution used effectively in crossexamination and in closing argument. We found that such performance was constitutionally deficient, in that counsel had failed to furnish the expert with easily available information such as a social history, a prior DOE V. AYERS 31 This left J.B. effectively without the assistance of any expert at all at the penalty phase. J.B.’s failure to retain a psychological expert for the penalty phase was objectively unreasonable, given that he had sufficient notice of Doe’s mental health problems. He knew – or would have known, if he had reviewed the interviews that D.S. conducted – that Doe’s mother brought him to a hospital for psychiatric help. D.S. stated in his assessment of Doe, which J.B. does appear to have read, that “he will not acknowledge that he has a psychiatric problem.” Doe’s mental illness was recognized by J.B.’s investigator, who was not a mental health expert. However, even this recognition was not enough to motivate J.B. to order a mitigation-related psychiatric examination of his client. The state’s assertion that Dr. M.R. addressed the issue of mitigating evidence in her report is incorrect. To the extent she commented on evidence relevant to the penalty-phase presentation, it was entirely in passing. “If in the course of performing [her limited-scope guilt-phase] evaluation [she had seen] issues that [she] thought would be useful for a penalty phase presentation, [she] would have flagged the issues for [J.B.].” Dr. M.R. was definitely not, however, “providing expert assistance in analyzing and developing a full-blown mitigation case.” Indeed, how could she have been? She “received no life history information regarding [Doe] from the defense.” Instead, she simply explained that psychiatric report, and jail medical records. Although we acknowledged that under Hendricks v. Calderon, 70 F.3d 1032 (9th Cir. 1995), ‘counsel does not have a duty to acquire sufficient background material on which an expert can base reliable psychiatric conclusions independent of any request for information from an expert,’ we concluded that the record did not support the district court’s finding that the expert had not requested such information.” (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)). 32 DOE V. AYERS “[she] had not seen any evidence that [she] believed to be mitigating during the course of evaluating whether [Doe] had a guilt phase mental defense.”20 Hiring an expert to evaluate possible guilt-phase mentalstate defenses does not discharge defense counsel’s duty to prepare for the penalty phase. Hendricks v. Calderon, 70 F.3d 1032 (9th Cir. 1995), is directly on point. In Frierson, we explained: Because the evidence presented at each phase of a trial serves a markedly different purpose, we analyze the reasonableness of counsel’s efforts to prepare for trial and sentencing differently. As we explained in Wallace v. Stewart: “Hendricks alludes to why the lawyer’s burden might differ at the guilt phase from that at the penalty phase: Mental state is relevant at the guilt phase for issues such as competence to stand trial and legal insanity – technical questions where a defendant must show a specific and very substantial level of mental impairment. Most defendants don’t have problems this severe, and counsel can’t be expected to know that further investigation is necessary to develop these issues. By contrast, all potentially mitigating evidence is relevant at the sentencing phase of a death case, so a troubled childhood and mental problems may help even if they don’t rise to a specific, technically-defined level.” 20 Emphasis added. DOE V. AYERS 33 Thus in Hendricks, we held that it was reasonable for counsel to rely on his experts’ findings that no diminished capacity defense was available at the guilt phase, and to terminate his perfunctory investigation of his client’s known mental impairments. Our determination in Hendricks that counsel’s investigatory work was reasonable, however, did not extend into the penalty phase. Because a sentencing jury is given “broad latitude to consider amorphous human factors, in effect, to weigh the worth of one’s life against his culpability,” we have recognized that the presentation of relevant mitigation evidence is of vital importance to the jury’s penalty determination. Accordingly, we concluded that “counsel’s failure to investigate his client’s mental condition as a mitigating factor in a penalty phase hearing, without a supporting strategic reason, constitute[d] deficient performance.” We therefore held that because evidence of Hendrick’s “nightmarish upbringing” and “mental problems” could have altered the jury’s decision to impose a death verdict, counsel was constitutionally ineffective. 463 F.3d at 993 (citations omitted). Compare Summerlin v. Schriro, 427 F.3d 623, 631 (9th Cir. 2005) (counsel’s performance was deficient for relying exclusively on information developed at the defendant’s pre-trial competency examination), with Stokley v. Ryan, 659 F.3d 802, 812–15 (9th Cir. 2011) (counsel’s performance was not 34 DOE V. AYERS deficient, in choosing a neurological exam over a neuropsychological exam, when either was recommended, because counsel did pursue mental health evaluations pertinent to sentencing, as recommended by mental health experts, provided the documents the experts suggested, and presented their testimony). Based on this evidence, the district court concluded that defense counsel “did not fulfill his responsibility to [Doe] on the issue of investigating and presenting mental health testimony simply by retaining Dr. [M.R.], given the brief time she spent with him.” Especially given that J.B. failed both to instruct Dr. M.R. specifically to investigate penalty-phase mitigation and to provide her with any of the documents necessary to complete that task (which she requested), we firmly agree.