Opinion ID: 78231
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Magwood's Cross-Appeal

Text: Magwood asserts multiple issues on cross-appeal. Specifically, he asserts the district court erred in denying him discovery and an evidentiary hearing on his claim he was denied effective assistance of counsel. Magwood asserts counsel was ineffective for failing to investigate and present any evidence at his resentencing, including mitigating evidence that was later obtained and proffered to the Alabama courts in the collateral challenge to his sentence, and appended to his habeas corpus petition in the district court. Magwood also contends the district court erred in denying him relief on the remainder of his ineffective assistance of counsel claims, including that his counsel: (1) failed to demand a jury at resentencing; (2) permitted the resentencing court to rely on the jury recommendation from the first sentencing and the State's wholesale introduction of the record, including inadmissible evidence from the trial and first sentencing; and (3) failed to object to the unconstitutional grounds of his resentencing. Magwood next contends the district court erred in declining to consider the merits of his claims that Alabama had suppressed internal departmental reports and documents that directly belied the Alabama court's expressed bases for reimposing a sentence of death notwithstanding the two statutory mental state mitigating circumstances, in violation of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963), and in denying discovery and an evidentiary hearing thereon. Magwood also asserts the district court erred by not granting him relief from his death sentence on the ground it was freakish and arbitrary, insofar as Magwood is the sole Alabamian to ever have been sentenced to death: (1) in the absence of at least one of the aggravating circumstances required by statute; or (2) having committed a capital offense while suffering from a mental disease that placed him under the influence of extreme mental disturbance and so impaired his capacity to appreciate the criminality of his act and to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law that those enumerated Alabama statutory mitigating circumstances were met, in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Magwood next argues the district court erred in denying relief on his claims that the resentencing court, in response to the federal court's writ vacating his first death sentence, merely substituted for its refusal to recognize the existence of Alabama's two statutory mental capacity mitigating circumstances, findings of his purported capacity that were the equivalent of their earlier refusal and, therefore, were incompatible with the prior writ, and that he was denied effective assistance due to his counsel's failure to object to the sentence on that ground. Finally, Magwood asserts Alabama unconstitutionally deprived Magwood of a jury on resentencing and he was involuntarily medicated and presented to the Alabama courts as competent and of apparent capacity. After hearing oral argument and reviewing the record and the parties' briefs, we find no error in the district court's denial of relief on the above-listed claims. Thus we affirm the district court's denial of relief on these claims.