Opinion ID: 2977007
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Failure to Timely Prepare

Text: Dr. James Eisenberg, Jells’s mitigation phase expert, testified at the habeas evidentiary hearing that he was not contacted by Jells’s trial counsel until September 2, 1987, two days after Jells had been convicted and only sixteen days prior to the mitigation hearing. Prior to that, counsel had failed to employ a mitigation specialist or expert who would have gathered evidence of Jells’s personal history and any available records. When Jells’s trial counsel contacted Dr. Eisenberg, they asked him to perform a psychological evaluation of Jells, but failed to provide him with Jells’s personal history records—records that would have been collected had they used a mitigation specialist—that were necessary for the evaluation. Without the history and records, Dr. Eisenberg was unable to perform the requested psychological evaluation. Thus, his testimony at the mitigation No. 02-3505 Jells v. Mitchell Page 10 hearing was not supported by a complete evaluation of Jells, but was supported by the limited psychological test he had time to administer. In addition, Jells’s counsel “failed to conduct an investigation that would have uncovered extensive records” describing Jells’s difficult youth. Williams, 529 U.S. at 395. Jells’s counsel interviewed only three family members, neglecting to speak with many other family members who had lived with Jells and were available. When speaking with the family members they did contact, their inquiry was brief and they failed to ask sufficiently probing questions; as a result they failed to discover the abuse that Jells received from his mother’s live-in boyfriend and his stepfather. Jells counsel did not obtain a psychological report prior to trial, and failed to obtain accessible school records—reports and records that would demonstrate that Jells had mental impairments, including learning difficulties that led to disruptions in the classroom and an extremely low reading level. Further, even if counsel could have claimed ignorance of Jells’s difficulties as a result of their abdication of responsibility to inquire into Jells’s background, information that would have “prodded” them into action was readily available to them in the Competency Report. This Competency Report provided the same sort of “prodding” information as the Department of Social Services records or the Presentence Investigation Report described in Wiggins, and, given such information, any “reasonably competent” attorney would have expanded the search for mitigating evidence beyond the three witnesses and would have questioned Jells and the three witnesses in further detail. See Wiggins, 539 U.S. 524. The failure of Jells’s trial counsel to begin mitigation preparations prior to the end of the culpability phase of Jells’s trial was objectively unreasonable under Strickland. See Glenn v. Tate, 71 F.3d 1204, 1207 (6th Cir. 1995) (concluding that counsel’s “fail[ure] to make any significant preparations for the sentencing phase until after the conclusion of the guilt phase . . . was objectively unreasonable”); see also Williams, 529 U.S. at 395 (finding it significant that “counsel did not begin to prepare for [the mitigation] phase of the proceeding until a week before the trial”); Hamblin, 354 F.3d at 487 n.2 (noting that, under the professional norms established by the ABA, a “mitigation investigation should begin as quickly as possible”); Greer v. Mitchell, 264 F.3d 663, 676-678 (6th Cir. 2000) (“Under circumstances where a finding of guilty cannot come as a surprise, failure to anticipate such a finding so as to adequately prepare for the sentencing phase is constitutionally impermissible.”). Accordingly, the Ohio Court of Appeals unreasonably applied Strickland when it neglected to find that Jells’s trial counsel’s failure prepare for the mitigation hearing in a timely fashion constituted deficient performance.