Opinion ID: 204733
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Counsel Was Constitutionally Ineffective

Text: The constitutional infirmities that plagued the penalty phase of Tibbetts's capital trial are unfortunately frequent. Yet again in this Circuit, however, a majority of a panel casts aside obvious and prejudicial errors by upholding a death sentence issued by a jury that was not informed of key mitigation evidence that could have made a difference in whether the jury decided that Tibbetts should die for his admittedly horrible crime. For the reasons discussed above, I believe that Tibbetts has shown that his trial counsel was constitutionally ineffective during Tibbetts's penalty phase. Counsel was clearly deficient in his investigation of mitigating evidence. Although he hired a mitigation specialist and requested several records from a variety of educational and medical institutions, counsel failed to follow up on the specialists' leads and explain the relevance of the introduced documents. Moreover, counsel called only one mitigation witness, who was not properly equipped to discuss Tibbetts's childhood. Most disturbingly, however, counsel failed to interview Tibbetts's family and friends, despite their willingness to provide information. Counsel's performance was constitutionally deficient. In addition, counsel's failure to uncover significant details about the abuse that Tibbetts suffered as a child was prejudicial. The information uncovered in post-conviction proceedings paint[ed] a significantly more detailed picture of [Tibbetts's] troubled background than the scant evidence introduced at the penalty phase, Jells, 538 F.3d at 499. The nonintroduced evidence provided numerous details of Tibbetts's abuse while in foster care and disclosed, for the first time, Tibbetts's abuse while under the care of his biological parents. In addition to providing additional substance, had counsel uncovered and presented the evidence disclosed during post-conviction proceedings, the jury would have heard the horrors of Tibbetts's upbringing from first-hand sources, and Tibbetts would have been able to stymie the State's attack on the truthfulness of Tibbetts's claims that he was abused. Presented with such evidence, the jury would have been provided with an alternative, much more compelling case for sparing Tibbetts's life. Because the Ohio Court of Appeals unreasonably applied clearly established law in concluding that counsel was not constitutionally ineffective, I would GRANT the writ of habeas corpus on this claim.