Opinion ID: 2237316
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Failure to Investigate Defendant's Background

Text: We next address Doyle's failure to investigate defendant's background with the information Doyle possessed, and conclude that this failure also fell below an objective standard of reasonableness under prevailing professional norms. Doyle claimed that he failed to investigate defendant's background because defendant would not give him any information. As a result, Doyle believed he had no information about defendant to investigate. Doyle specifically denied knowing any information about defendant's mother or father, or knowing whether defendant had any brothers or sisters until defendant gave him the information during the preparation of the affidavit just prior to sentencing. However, Doyle did have defendant's school records which contained family information such as his mother's name, his sister's name, his brother's name, addresses and telephone numbers from the time the reports were compiled, the fact that the family was on ADC, the names of defendant's schools, his teachers' initials, and the names of the qualified school psychologists who prepared the reports. The reports also stated that defendant's father had abandoned the family and shown little concern for their welfare. In addition to the school records, Doyle had defendant's 1979 conviction record, which contained his last known address prior to incarceration, and defendant's birth certificate, which contained both his mother's and father's name. Doyle, however, failed to investigate any of this information or send his court-appointed investigator to investigate any of this for mitigating information. We are unable to discern any strategy developed by Doyle which would entail not investigating the only information he had concerning defendant's background. We find that Doyle's failure to investigate was the result of ignorance of the family information contained in the various records he possessed. Doyle thus did not make a thorough investigation of defendant's background for mitigating evidence. In concluding this, we acknowledge that Doyle was in a difficult situation due to defendant's recalcitrance. However, as Lyon testified, a recalcitrant defendant is a very common problem in capital cases, and there are ways to solve this problem. In such a situation, an attorney could search for as much information about a defendant as he can and confront the defendant with it (see Mitchell v. Kemp (11th Cir.1985), 762 F.2d 886 (where defendant told counsel not to use his family and court found it important that counsel ignored this and contacted defendant's father anyway)) or have an expert examine the defendant and attempt to understand his recalcitrance. Doyle did none of this, despite defendant's history of mental deficiency and Becraft's report indicating defendant's family had abandoned him, which should have alerted Doyle to possible reasons behind defendant's unwillingness to provide information. We further note that Doyle's failure to investigate defendant's background with the information he possessed is more troubling in light of the fact that defendant opened up a bit prior to the sentencing hearing and did in fact give Doyle information to investigate. [E]very advocate and counselor should be aware that the emotional and psychological stress accompanying the intense confrontational drama of a capital trial distorts reactions and affects decisions. It is not unusual for clients in all kinds of cases to be unshakeably adamant in their views at first, only to change their minds later, when time and trust in counsel cause them to perceive matters differently. (Goodpaster, The Trial for Life: Effective Assistance of Counsel in Death Penalty Cases, 58 N.Y.U.L.Rev. 299, 322 (1983).) A thorough investigation by Doyle of the information available to him previously could have facilitated an investigation into the information defendant did eventually provide. Instead, Doyle simply made a few telephone calls, found nothing helpful, and gave up. Doyle did not travel to Chicago, or even send his investigator, to look into the information. Doyle also did not inform the court of his situation, or request a continuance to investigate the new information. We conclude that defendant has satisfied the first prong of the Strickland analysis by showing Doyle's failure to investigate and present defendant's mental history to the jury, and Doyle's failure to investigate defendant's background with the information he had.