Opinion ID: 3065125
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Mental Health at the Time of Trial

Text: Hamilton’s mental health showed no signs of improvement two decades after his initial psychiatric evaluations. Rather, the available documentary evidence reveals he was still suffering from depression at the time of trial. Hamilton testified that he had attempted suicide in prison in December 1981, shortly after his wife’s death, by injecting toilet bowl cleaner into his arm. Defense counsel was aware of the incident before trial began but disputed that it was a legitimate suicide attempt. Hamilton allegedly told counsel that he faked the attempt so he could sleep in a better bed, eat a good meal, and try to escape. Hamilton unequivocally denied making this statement. Approximately five months after the alleged attempt, Hamilton was treated for depression while awaiting trial. The attending psychologist diagnosed him as having “[a]djustment disorder, with depressed mood subsequent to being incarcerated and charged with murder.” A physician thereafter prescribed an antidepressant medication, Tofranil. On October 18, 1982, one month before the penalty phase, Hamilton wrote defense counsel a note telling him that he was taking Tofranil. Hamilton provided a telephone number followed by the words, “Mental Health”; beneath the number, Hamilton wrote, “Ask to speak to someone concerning my medication.” Counsel testified at the evidentiary hearing that he never investigated the specific effects of Tofranil. It is undisputed that defense counsel was not a physician or otherwise qualified to evaluate Hamilton’s mental health at the time of trial. When Hamilton was reevaluated for purposes of his habeas petition by Shirley Reece, George Woods (a psychiatrist), and HAMILTON v. AYERS 13633 James Merikangas (a psychiatrist and neurologist),18 they all agreed that his abusive childhood had adversely impacted his mental health and that the negative effects had worsened over time. These effects were explained in the declarations that these doctors submitted at the evidentiary hearing. Reece summarizes her evaluation of Hamilton as follows: To know and understand Michael Hamilton, one must consult many first hand sources, most impor- tant of which are the family into which he was born. By all current measures, he was raised in an environment of intergenerational alcoholism, child abuse, and domestic violence . . . . [Y]et, tragically no individual, agency, nor military authorities ever intervened to protect the children . . . . . There is abundant evidence that all of the children in the Hamilton family were severely deprived in every sense of the word and lacked the normal affectional bonds and guidance which foster healthy develop- ment and prosocial behavior . . . . Michael was repeatedly subjected to gross maltreatment and incredible psychological abuse; and surely by all reasonable standards his parents’ behavior was both deviant and depraved. Woods’s declaration corroborates Reece’s assessment of Hamilton’s background and supplements it with medical opinions. Woods observes that Hamilton’s “sense of hopelessness, learned helplessness and chronic anxiety have their roots in those times he was forced to witness sadistic attacks against family members and was unable to help them.” Woods concludes that, throughout his life, Hamilton has endured “environmental, developmental and traumagenic factors beyond his 18 Like Reece, Woods both interviewed Hamilton and reviewed over one thousand pages of relevant documents as part of his evaluation. Although Merikangas did not interview Hamilton, he did review all the available medical records and other relevant documents. 13634 HAMILTON v. AYERS control,” which have resulted in “serious psychiatric disorders that substantially altered his ability to understand and function in the world around him.” Woods determines that these disorders “compromise [Hamilton’s] ability fully to appreciate the nature and consequences of his acts or to conform his conduct to the requirement of law.” Woods adds that the medication Hamilton was taking during trial “exacerbated preexisting mental disorders and made it extremely unlikely that he would have been able to weigh and consider such issues as the advantages and disadvantages to testifying.” Merikangas’s review of the relevant records similarly led him to conclude that “Hamilton in all likelihood has significant neurological dysfunction and psychiatric impairments that affected his behavior both at the time of the offense and subsequently.” The State offered no testimony or declarations to rebut the conclusions of Reece, Woods, and Merikangas. [23] “We realize that the duty to investigate and prepare a defense is not limitless,” and that “it does not necessarily require that every conceivable witness be interviewed or that counsel must pursue every path until it bears fruit or until all conceivable hope withers.” United States v. Tucker, 716 F.2d 576, 584 (9th Cir. 1983) (quoting Lovett v. Florida, 627 F.2d 706, 708 (5th Cir. 1980)) (internal quotation marks omitted). We impose nowhere near that standard of perfection here. Defense counsel did not even exhaust the few sources of information of which he was aware. Rather, he effectively abandoned his investigation “after having acquired only rudimentary knowledge of [the defendant’s] history from a narrow set of sources.” Wiggins, 539 U.S. at 524. Given the abundance of classic mitigating evidence that was available, we conclude that counsel’s investigation fell far below the constitutional floor. d) 1982 Standard [24] In reaching its conclusion that defense counsel’s performance was not deficient, the district court went astray by HAMILTON v. AYERS 13635 holding counsel to a lesser standard of performance than existed in 1982. As the Supreme Court has long recognized, the ABA Standards for Criminal Justice provide guidance as to what constitutes a “reasonable” performance. Strickland, 466 U.S. at 688-89; see Rompilla v. Beard, 545 U.S. 374, 387 (2005); Wiggins, 539 U.S. at 524; Williams, 529 U.S. at 396. The standards in effect at the time of Hamilton’s trial recognized that “[i]t is the duty of the lawyer to conduct a prompt investigation of the circumstances of the case and to explore all avenues leading to facts relevant to the merits of the case and the penalty in the event of conviction.” 1 ABA Standards for Criminal Justice 4-4.1 (2d ed. 1980) (emphasis added). Fulfilling these obligations was as crucial in 1982 as it is today “in order to assure individualized sentencing and the defendant’s right to a fair and reliable capital penalty proceeding.” Ainsworth, 268 F.3d at 877. We thus have held that trial counsel falls below these standards by failing to investigate adequately and present available mitigating evidence to the jury. See, e.g., Summerlin, 427 F.3d at 629-33 (1982 trial) (holding that counsel performed deficiently where he failed to investigate and present available mitigating evidence that the defendant was severely abused as a child and had suffered from ongoing mental health problems); see also, e.g., Karis, 283 F.3d at 1139 (1982 trial) (holding that counsel’s performance was not reasonable under the circumstances where he was aware of evidence that the defendant was severely beaten as a child and yet failed to investigate the evidence further or to present it to the jury); Silva, 279 F.3d at 847 (1982 trial) (holding that counsel was deficient in failing to meet his “duty to determine what evidence was out there in mitigation in order to make an informed decision as to how to best represent his client”); Ainsworth, 268 F.3d at 877 (1980 trial) (“[C]ounsel’s deficient performance resulted from the failure to prepare and present mitigating evidence, interview witnesses, and investigate available documents and other available information.”). The district court made much of the fact that the “[s]tandard practice in death penalty defense in Tulare County 13636 HAMILTON v. AYERS in 1982, the time of Hamilton’s trial, was different from today[’s].” In focusing on the particular ways in which the “standard practice” has changed, however, the district court failed to recognize the ways it has remained the same. For example, we need not decide whether standard practice at the time of trial included retaining a “mitigation expert”— someone specially trained in investigating and presenting mitigating evidence at the penalty phase of a capital trial— because the deficient performance here did not result from counsel’s failure to hire a specialized investigator. Rather, it resulted from counsel’s failure to pursue obvious leads provided by the people he did interview, to review relevant documents that were in his possession, and to present to the jury the mitigating evidence of which he was aware, among the other errors we have chronicled above. Similarly, we need not decide whether standard capital practice in Tulare County in 1982 included preparing a “social history” report per se. It is undisputed that counsel was required to obtain the type of available information that a social history report would contain, such as family and social background and mental health, which Hamilton’s counsel failed to do. [25] The district court clearly erred in relying on the testimony of Hamilton’s trial counsel as to the “standard capital practice” at the time of trial and rejecting the testimony of Hamilton’s Strickland expert. Trial counsel had never before worked on a death penalty case, had never attended a death penalty seminar, and did not recall looking into the ABA standards before or during his representation of Hamilton. By contrast, the Strickland expert’s testimony as to the minimal steps that counsel was required to take in 1982 is consistent with our established case law and that of the Supreme Court. The district court’s finding that defense counsel satisfied these minimal obligations is clearly erroneous. The jury “saw only glimmers of the defendant’s history, and received no evidence about its significance vis-a-vis mitigating circumstances.” Ainsworth, 268 F.3d at 874 (alterations and internal quotation marks omitted). Moreover, as in Ainsworth, “[a] reasonable HAMILTON v. AYERS 13637 investigation would have uncovered a substantial amount of readily available mitigating evidence that could have been presented to the jury.” Id. Because both the investigation and presentation of mitigating evidence at the penalty phase were unreasonable under the prevailing professional norms at the time of trial, we hold that counsel’s performance was deficient.