Opinion ID: 853470
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Failure to Develop Expert Testimony

Text: Despite their suspicions that Prowell suffered from severe mental illness and their decision to rely on the judge's reluctance to sentence a mentally ill person to death, Vowels and Danks did not retain Dill until ten months after they were appointed to represent Prowell and two-and-a-half months after the guilty plea. Nor did they hire mitigation investigator Steve Brock until a week after Prowell had pleaded guilty. Vowels, who had previously served as second chair in the defense of Anderson, a death-penalty-eligible defendant who pleaded guilty but mentally ill, had experience with gathering evidence of mental health mitigators, but did not attempt do so until after Prowell's plea. Without the assistance of a psychologist or psychiatrist and a mitigation investigator, Prowell's trial counsel did not have the basic information necessary to advise Prowell as to a plea of guilty but mentally ill, nor did they have the ability to argue persuasively for a plea agreement on that basis. The fact that Vowels waited until after Prowell had pleaded guilty to retain a mental health expert is in itself troubling. But concern is heightened by the haphazard way Vowels went about hiring that expert. The same Liffick who examined Prowell before his postconviction relief hearing and diagnosed him as suffering from schizophrenia was a psychiatric witness in the Anderson case. Despite Vowels' prior experience with Liffick, who was the Medical Director of the Southwestern Indiana Mental Health Center in Evansville and an expert in schizophrenia, when Vowels finally did produce an expert to testify at Prowell's sentencing, he relied on the recommendation of a new lawyer who knew Dill only through Dill's testimony in Social Security disability benefits hearings. Finally, Liffick, Bailey, and Dill all agreed in postconviction testimony that when Dill was eventually retained, he was not given enough time or adequate information to diagnose Prowell properly. Dill did not have the time to establish a relationship with Prowell that would enable him to gain useful information. Bailey testified that without records or other evidence that a patient's symptoms had lasted longer than six months, no doctor could, in good conscience, arrive at a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In simple terms, Prowell's under-diagnosis as suffering from paranoid personality disorder was a direct result of his counsel's failure to retain a mental health expert in a timely manner and their failure to provide the sole expert with essential information.