Opinion ID: 4530962
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel (IAC) at the

Text: Penalty Phase
In its memorandum order the district court reviewed the relevant filings and then described Benson’s childhood. He was the fourth child in a family of six boys and a girl. His mother was a drug addict, and both she and his father were alcoholics. Benson and his brothers were sent to live on a farm near Petaluma with a foster mother, Marjorie Buchanan. Life on the farm was represented at trial as relatively normal, aside from the fact that the boys seldom saw their natural parents. When Benson was nine years old, his father obtained physical custody over him, and Benson and his brothers went to live with his father and a stepmother in a motel in Long further delay of this action that granting a stay under Gonzalez [v. Wong, 667 F.3d 965 (9th Cir. 2011)] would entail. Also weighing against the grant of a stay is the fact that petitioner has apparently made no effort until now to present the alleged new evidence to the California Supreme Court even though he has had the deposition transcript where the “evidence” appears since 2002. BENSON V. CHAPPELL 35 Beach. Within weeks the family was evicted, and for the next three years they lived “in seedy, skid row hotels, houses, apartments and shanties, including a converted chicken coop, never staying in any one place more than a few months or the time it took for the manager or landlord to realize that no rent was forthcoming.” The father, a chronic alcoholic, was always unemployed and looking for money. The boys continually attended different schools, and worked at whatever odd jobs they could find. The district court noted: The county protective services agency sometimes intervened to remove the Benson children from their father’s custody and place them in various foster and group homes. Off and on, the boys were reunited with their father, only to be repeatedly split up and placed in foster and group homes again. Finally when petitioner was 11 or 12, after three years of sporadically living with their father, the children were permanently taken from their father, and they were never together again as a family. All of the boys turned to alcohol to escape from reality, but Sandy [the daughter] did not. Benson lived in group homes and institutions from age 11 onward and had difficulty adjusting to society. He began drinking alcohol and using marijuana at age 15. He was arrested a number of times for drunk driving and began using amphetamines and barbiturates around age 18. He went to junior high school in Los Angeles, and although he missed the last three weeks of school because he was placed in 36 BENSON V. CHAPPELL juvenile hall, all of his grades were passing and some were excellent. He told a school counselor that no one cared, no one believed him, he wanted to be with his brothers and sisters, and it was all his parents’ fault. Benson was first arrested at age 10, and was first committed to the California Youth Authority (CYA) at age 13. He was removed from one foster home after he engaged in sexual activity with a younger female there. The district court further noted that Benson also had molested a fouryear-old girl, but it was not reported to the authorities, he had a number of window-peeping charges, and he was a pedophile from age 14. Between June 1967, when he was released from the CYA, and his arrest in 1971, Benson had 13 run-ins with the law and spent a year in custody. After his 1972 conviction, Benson was confined at Atascadero State Hospital until 1974. Due to his criminal activity and convictions, Benson was out of custody for less than a year between 1975 and 1985.
The district court noted that trial counsel’s strategy at the penalty stage had been to argue that Benson “was a ‘normal’ little boy on the Buchanans’ Petaluma farm, who was not born evil, but was a poor child taken from a normal life at the ranch and exposed to severe deprivation when his father took him and his brothers away from the ranch.” The court then reviewed the mitigating evidence that Benson contends should have been presented including his predisposition to mental illness, exposure to alcohol in his mother’s womb, the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse inflicted on Benson BENSON V. CHAPPELL 37 by the Buchanans, and his numerous serious and longstanding mental deficiencies. The district court nonetheless denied relief on Benson’s IAC claim, reasoning: Having before it, as it did, petitioner’s complete social history and the psychiatric diagnoses of Drs. Able [sic] and Foster, the California Supreme Court could reasonably have concluded that the additional information provided in connection with petitioner’s first state habeas petition would have been insufficient to establish a reasonable probability that at least one juror would be persuaded to sentence petitioner to life without parole instead of the death penalty. Although petitioner’s current account of his history is sordid and awful, his crimes were heinous, and the aggravating evidence presented by the prosecution was also sordid. The state court could reasonably have concluded that presenting petitioner as a normal little boy who was removed from a nurturing environment on the Buchanan farm and exposed to severe deprivation while living with his father might have benefitted petitioner, and that such a person would be more worthy of sympathy and a life sentence than someone who was environmentally and genetically damaged beyond rehabilitation from the beginning. 38 BENSON V. CHAPPELL The district court distinguished the then-most-recent Ninth Circuit case, Stankewitz v. Wong, 698 F.3d 1163 (9th Cir. 2012). The court noted that unlike counsel in Stankewitz, Benson’s counsel did present mitigating evidence,14 and that Benson had “committed four murders which, however callous, were far from impulsive.” The district court concluded that Benson’s claim of IAC at the penalty stage “[did] not survive review under AEDPA.”