Opinion ID: 3187889
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Investigative Assistance

Text: As mentioned above, an appeal of a denial of investigate assistance does not require a COA and is reviewed for abuse of discretion. For this particular claim, Ayestas argues the district court should not have examined the merits of his IATC claims until it provided him with a mitigation specialist and allowed the results of that investigation to be presented. Ayestas argues that under Martinez and Trevino, in order to prove that his prior lawyers were ineffective, he must be allowed to develop and discover what his prior lawyers should have developed or discovered. As Ayestas explains: By prematurely deciding that [Ayestas’s] IATC claims were facially meritless, without affording resources for factual development under 18 U.S.C. § 3599(f). . . . the district court summarily dismissed [Ayestas’s] petition based solely on its review of the allegations contained in the original petition filed in 2009. Ayestas argues that the merits of the IATC claim cannot rest on the record from the state habeas proceeding, which allegedly is infected with the work of ineffective counsel. Instead, he must be allowed to develop new evidence to support his factual allegations. The argument, at least in part, is foreclosed by circuit precedent. A district court is within its discretion to deny an application for funding “when a petitioner has [] failed to supplement his funding request with a viable constitutional claim that is not procedurally barred.” Brown v. Stephens, 762 F.3d 454, 459 (5th Cir. 2014), cert. denied, 135 S. Ct. 1733 (2015). Though Brown dealt with a defendant bringing an initial federal habeas claim and Ayestas’s current appeal is before us on remand from the Supreme Court, the difference in procedural postures is not significant. The district court properly considered the procedural default prior to approving Section 3599(f) funding for this federal habeas claim. In two recent post-Martinez and Trevino opinions, this court held that Section 3599(f) funding is available if the district court finds that there is a 7 Case: 15-70015 Document: 00513434126 Page: 8 Date Filed: 03/22/2016 No. 15-70015 “substantial need” for such services to pursue a claim that is not procedurally barred. Allen v. Stephens, 805 F.3d 617, 626, 638−39 (5th Cir. 2015); Wade v. Stephens, 777 F.3d 250, 266 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 136 S. Ct. 86 (2015). Ayestas argues the district court, and by extension these two precedents, required an impossibility: proving deficient performance in order to be given resources to discover the evidence of deficient performance. He mischaracterizes the requirement. There must be a viable constitutional claim, not a meritless one, and not simply a search for evidence that is supplemental to evidence already presented. Brown, 762 F.3d at 459. The basic point is that a prisoner cannot get funding to search for whatever can be found to support an as-yet unidentified basis for holding that his earlier counsel was constitutionally ineffective. Instead, there must be a substantiated argument, not speculation, about what the prior counsel did or omitted doing. Ayestas indeed offered such an argument. We interpret the district court’s ruling as being that any evidence of ineffectiveness, even if found, would not support relief. The district court did not abuse its discretion when it declined to authorize a mitigation specialist for Ayestas before it determined the viability of Ayestas’s claim. We still must decide if the district court properly denied Ayestas investigative assistance on the basis that a mitigation specialist was not “reasonably necessary” because his claim was meritless. For this, we must briefly analyze the underlying merits of Ayestas’s claim. See id. We turn now to that question.