Opinion ID: 4556600
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: state postconviction

Text: After exhausting his direct appeals, Mr. McWhorter, through new counsel, filed a state postconviction motion under Alabama Rule of Criminal Procedure 32. Two of the claims Mr. McWhorter raised are relevant here. First, he claimed he was denied an impartial jury. He said that a juror, Linda Burns, deliberately provided a false answer on the voir dire questionnaire. The question asked whether Ms. Burns knew anyone who had been a victim of a crime, and she failed 4 Case: 19-11535 Date Filed: 08/18/2020 Page: 5 of 35 to disclose that her father died under suspicious circumstances. Second, Mr. McWhorter claimed his trial counsel was ineffective for failing to investigate and present mitigation evidence during the penalty phase of his trial. The state court held an evidentiary hearing on Mr. McWhorter’s Rule 32 motion from August 26– 28, 2009. Mr. McWhorter presented a significant amount of evidence. Mr. McWhorter called four witnesses in connection with his biased jury claim. He called Ms. Burns, the purportedly biased juror, who testified about the circumstances of her father’s death as well as her thoughts at the time she answered the voir dire questionnaire. We discuss Ms. Burns’s testimony in more detail below. Mr. McWhorter also called April Stonecypher, another of the jurors at his trial. Ms. Stonecypher testified that during deliberations, Ms. Burns “started telling a story about how years before . . . her father had been murdered, and that . . . she now had to walk around in the same town where this man was that killed her father.” Ms. Stonecypher said that Ms. Burns was crying when she said this. And Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Berry, Mr. McWhorter’s trial counsel, testified about their process of selecting jurors during voir dire. Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Berry also testified in connection with Mr. McWhorter’s ineffective assistance claim. Both described their “good kid, wrong crowd” theory of mitigating evidence. Counsel explained that they interviewed Mr. McWhorter, his mother, aunt, and sister; gathered background information; 5 Case: 19-11535 Date Filed: 08/18/2020 Page: 6 of 35 and hired a neuropsychologist, Dr. Douglas Robbins. Because Dr. Robbins found that Mr. McWhorter’s neuropsychological testing results were “unremarkable,” counsel said they chose not to have him testify at the penalty stage. Dr. Robbins testified at the Rule 32 hearing and confirmed his (lack of) mental health findings, explaining that he did not find any evidence of brain damage. Mr. McWhorter presented additional witnesses who he said would have furthered counsel’s “good kid, wrong crowd” theory. Frank Baker, Mr. McWhorter’s former math teacher and basketball coach, testified that McWhorter was an average student who didn’t cause trouble in class and worked hard to improve his basketball game and be part of the team. Kenneth Burns, another former teacher, testified that Mr. McWhorter was “a good kid” and an average student who worked diligently to get Bs and Cs. Mr. McWhorter’s friend, Amy Battle, also testified that McWhorter was a “great kid” who was “funny and outgoing and flirty.” Mr. McWhorter also presented evidence of his significant history of substance abuse. Mr. Rowland, Mr. McWhorter’s stepfather, testified that McWhorter was a great kid until he reached the age of 10. It was at that point that Mr. McWhorter’s attitude changed and he started huffing gasoline and freon. Mr. Rowland also said Mr. McWhorter stole Rowland’s truck. Mr. McWhorter was sent to a detention home for 30 days. Following these incidents, Mr. McWhorter 6 Case: 19-11535 Date Filed: 08/18/2020 Page: 7 of 35 lived with his aunt, Ms. Garrison, for 3–4 months and then with his friend Abraham Barnes’s family. Two members of Mr. McWhorter’s family, Larry Evans and Michael Evans, provided more details about McWhorter’s childhood substance abuse. Larry said that on a few occasions he, Mr. McWhorter, and other young family members huffed gasoline until they passed out. Larry also testified that huffing gasoline “would make you where you can’t remember.” Michael’s testimony about Mr. McWhorter’s drug use was similarly disconcerting. He said that he and Mr. McWhorter huffed gasoline several times a day on the weekends for 2–3 years. The Evanses also testified that Mr. McWhorter’s grandfather, Jesse Evans, was a physically violent alcoholic. They said that Mr. McWhorter “could have” been around Jesse when he was hitting McWhorter’s grandmother, because McWhorter often visited his grandparents on the weekends. Mr. McWhorter’s high school friends gave more testimony about his substance abuse. Tiffany Long, who dated Mr. McWhorter when she was 15, testified that she and McWhorter “drank pretty much every time [they] were together.” Abraham Barnes, who was “like [a] brother[]” to Mr. McWhorter, said the two teenagers drank “[w]hen we were awake . . . . If we weren’t in school . . . , we were drinking.” When they were drinking, they took turns playing Russian 7 Case: 19-11535 Date Filed: 08/18/2020 Page: 8 of 35 roulette with a loaded pistol. Mr. Barnes testified that he and Mr. McWhorter did these things because they never thought they would live to see adulthood. Next, Ms. Garrison testified and expanded on the testimony she gave during the penalty phase, explaining the difficulties Mr. McWhorter experienced as a child. She said Tommy McWhorter (Mr. McWhorter’s biological father) drank a lot, did not work, neglected McWhorter, and abused McWhorter’s mother. Ms. Garrison said when Mr. McWhorter was about 10 years old, he started rebelling against his mother and stepfather. Mr. Rowland responded by “whip[ping]” him. On one occasion, Ms. Garrison saw bruises from one of these whippings and reported the Rowlands to social services. After that, Mr. McWhorter’s behavior got worse. He went from not listening, to sneaking out of the house, to stealing his stepfather’s car.1 Shortly after he took the car, Ms. Garrison took Mr. McWhorter in. To provide him with some structure, she required that he follow her rules, including abstaining from alcohol. Nevertheless, after a few months, Ms. Garrison found Mr. McWhorter so drunk that she thought he was dead. He also stole Mr. Rowland’s truck again and crashed it. After crashing the truck, Mr. McWhorter went back to living with the Rowlands. 1 As a result of this incident, Ms. Rowland sent Mr. McWhorter to stay with his grandparents a few days each week. 8 Case: 19-11535 Date Filed: 08/18/2020 Page: 9 of 35 Finally, two experts testified about the effects of Mr. McWhorter’s difficult childhood and substance abuse on his mental health. Janet Vogelsang, a licensed clinical social worker, performed a “biopsychosocial assessment” of Mr. McWhorter and his family. Ms. Vogelsang explained that she gathered a vast amount of information that shed light on how Mr. McWhorter was “shaped” and “molded.” Based on her research, Ms. Vogelsang opined that Mr. McWhorter was “robb[ed] . . . of the opportunity to have a strong male role model;” was neglected by his biological father; and had no adult supervision during his early teenage years. Ms. Vogelsang said these combined events all had a huge impact on Mr. McWhorter and corresponded with the escalation in his drinking and drug use. Dr. Ralph Tarter, a neuropsychologist who specializes in adolescent alcoholism and the relationship between alcoholic parents and their children, testified as well. Dr. Tarter did not perform a psychological evaluation of Mr. McWhorter, but he reviewed the record and opined that Dr. Robbins (who concluded that McWhorter’s neurological test was unremarkable, and whom trial counsel did not have testify) did not ask all the “crucial” questions necessary for a complete evaluation. Dr. Tarter said that without obtaining a complete evaluation it was not possible to get a full understanding of Mr. McWhorter’s clinical profile. Nevertheless, Dr. Tarter agreed with Dr. Robbins that Mr. McWhorter’s evaluation showed he had a “high energy level, poor behavioral control and limited 9 Case: 19-11535 Date Filed: 08/18/2020 Page: 10 of 35 intellectual capacity to override that deficiency.” Dr. Tarter, however, said that he would have performed additional tests based on these results. Additional tests would have “identif[ied] and measure[d] the severity of neuropsychologic deficit,” which is a “chemical” dysfunction in the brain, as opposed to structural brain damage. Finally, Dr. Tarter said, based on reports about Mr. McWhorter’s biological father, McWhorter was genetically predisposed to become an alcoholic. The fact that Mr. McWhorter grew up in an unstable environment and huffed gasoline at a young age made this genetic risk more significant. After hearing all of this evidence, the state court denied Mr. McWhorter’s petition on both the biased jury claim and the ineffective assistance claim. The state court first found that Mr. McWhorter did not meet his burden to show that Ms. Burns believed her father was the victim of a crime and failed to disclose that fact during voir dire. The court explained that “[d]espite the rumors of murder that she heard as a child, Burns had reason to believe that her father’s death was not a homicide.” It also determined that Mr. McWhorter was not prejudiced by Ms. Burns’s presence on the jury. In finding that Mr. McWhorter failed to show Ms. Burns’s decisions “might have been affected by her father’s death,” the state court relied on Ms. Burns’s “unequivocal” testimony “that her father’s death did not affect her role as a juror.” 10 Case: 19-11535 Date Filed: 08/18/2020 Page: 11 of 35 Second, the state court dismissed Mr. McWhorter’s ineffective assistance claim that trial counsel failed to investigate mitigating evidence. It found that trial counsel’s “good kid, wrong crowd” strategy was a reasonable strategy, and that counsel presented testimony to support that strategy during the guilt and penalty phases. The court specifically noted that Dr. Robbins’s report “provided no useful mitigation evidence” and did not fault trial counsel for not presenting mentalhealth-related evidence. It also analyzed counsel’s decision not to present the testimony of each individual witness and concluded that counsel’s performance was not deficient in each instance. Mr. McWhorter appealed the denial of his Rule 32 motion to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals (“CCA”). The CCA affirmed the denial of Mr. McWhorter’s biased jury claim, reasoning that although Ms. Burns “appeared to waver in her responses to postconviction counsel’s questioning . . . we cannot say that [she] failed to respond truthfully to the question posed on the juror questionnaire.” McWhorter v. State, 142 So. 3d 1195, 1218–19 (Ala. Crim. App. 2011). The CCA further held there was “no indication that McWhorter might have been prejudiced by [Ms. Burns’s] failure to respond that her father was a victim of a crime on the juror questionnaire or to a voir dire question.” Id. at 1221. The CCA also affirmed the denial of Mr. McWhorter’s ineffective assistance claim. It quoted the state court’s reasoning: 11 Case: 19-11535 Date Filed: 08/18/2020 Page: 12 of 35 Experienced trial counsel collected the comprehensive background information . . . , Dr. Robbins’s evaluation, and other documents, and formulated a reasonable strategy that they believed could save McWhorter’s life: McWhorter was a good boy, who fell in with the wrong crowd, and he made a terrible mistake but does not deserve the death penalty, Id. at 1237. The CCA ultimately upheld the state court’s finding that trial counsel’s mitigation strategy was reasonable. Id. at 1238, 1245. The CCA was also “confident that the mitigating evidence presented at the postconviction hearing—but omitted from the penalty phase of McWhorter’s capital-murder trial—would have had no impact on the sentence in this case.” Id. at 1250. The CCA’s decision is the decision we review under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d); see also Morton v. Sec’y, Fla. Dep’t of Corr., 684 F.3d 1157, 1165–66 (11th Cir. 2012).