Opinion ID: 147525
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Counsel's performance resulted in prejudice

Text: The state court found that, even assuming that counsel were deficient, Phillips was not prejudiced by the jury's ignorance of the subsequently discovered mitigating evidence. Because the state court decided this constitutional issue in cursory fashion `without extended discussion,' this court applies a modified form of AEDPA review. See Maldonado v. Wilson, 416 F.3d 470, 476 (6th Cir.2005) (quoting Harris v. Stovall, 212 F.3d 940, 943 n. 1 (6th Cir.2000)). The modified-AEDPA standard of review requires that the court conduct a careful review of the record and applicable law, but nonetheless bars [it] from reversing unless the state court's decision is contrary to or an unreasonable application of federal law. Id. As the majority notes, to obtain relief under the prejudice prong of Strickland, Phillips is required to demonstrate a reasonable probability that the newly available mitigation evidence would have led to a different result. Wiggins, 539 U.S. at 537, 123 S.Ct. 2527. A reasonable probability is a probability sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome. Strickland, 466 U.S. at 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Thus, if there is a reasonable probability that a single member of the jury would have found, based on both the newly-discovered and any previously introduced mitigation evidence, that the aggravating circumstances of the crime did not outweigh the mitigating circumstances, and if the state court's conclusion to the contrary was an objectively unreasonable application of federal law, Phillips is entitled to a new penalty-phase trial. See Williams v. Anderson, 460 F.3d 789, 804 (6th Cir. 2006); Hamblin, 354 F.3d at 493; see also Wiggins, 539 U.S. at 537, 123 S.Ct. 2527. Phillips has met this burden. In the mitigation phase of the trial, the jury was presented with a picture of Phillips as a nice, normal young man, who generally was non-violent and good with children. As noted, these claims were absurd in light of the jury's conviction. Edminister himself acknowledged that the portrayal of Phillips as a good kid who snapped did not make sense. The falsity of this story became even more apparent when Phillips's mitigation witnesses, including his convicted-felon parents, admitted on cross-examination that Phillips had struck Evans in the past and been suspended from school for violent outbursts. Nor is it any surprise that Dr. Brown's testimony failed to reduce Phillips's culpability in the eyes of the jury. Dr. Brown benignly described Phillips as rather simple [and] emotionally immature and unpersuasively explained the brutal rape and murder as the result of Phillips's repeated frustrations in his life, which caused his anger [to] build[] up so that it comes out and it seems way out of proportion to what may trigger it. . . . Such evidence was useless to a jury seeking to understand why a person could have done what Phillips did. If Phillips's attorneys had pursued the leads of which they were aware, they would have discovered the mitigating evidence that would have allowed the jury to better understand what led Phillips to commit his horrific crime. See Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302, 319, 109 S.Ct. 2934, 106 L.Ed.2d 256 (1989) (Evidence about the defendant's background and character is relevant because of the belief, long held by this society, that defendants who commit criminal acts that are attributable to a disadvantaged background . . . may be less culpable than defendants who have no such excuse.); Johnson, 544 F.3d at 604-05 (finding prejudice where no witness testified about the abuse and privation the defendant and his brother suffered as a way of life, and where evidence of the defendant's abusive childhood environment would have presented the jury with a plausible reason to spare the defendant's life). Had counsel fulfilled their constitutional duty, the jury would have known that Phillips grew up undernourished and without adequate clothing in a house littered with dog feces and crawling with cockroaches. They would have heard that his parents regularly bought shoplifted items from their drug-clientele, that as a seventh-grader he watched as his parents and half-sister were arrested in a drug raid at his home. They would have heard that prostitution was common on the street in front of Phillips's home and that he was exposed to drugs and sexual activity at a young age because of parties thrown by his parents. Most importantly, the jury would have heard of the repeated reports that the Phillips children were being severely abused. The jury heard that Phillips was a normal, all-American boy who liked to play with model airplanes. The jury did not hear, however, what the CSB records and the affidavits of Phillips's half-siblings reveal: that he was surrounded by violence, without interruption, from the time of his birth to the age of nineteen. Instead of the rosy and wholly unbelievable picture Phillips's counsel presented, the jury should have heard that Phillips's father beat him, beat his mother, broke dishes over his half-sister's head when she failed to clean them properly, beat his twelve-year-old brother over the back with a two-by-four, and punched the childrenmale and female alikein the face. They should have heard that Phillips's father regularly threw Phillips's half-brother and two half-sisters against the wall to punish them and grabbed Phillips's half-brother by the hair, just as Phillips would later do to Sheila. They should have heard that Phillips's father molested his half-sisters, one of whom was mentally retarded, and abused them while they were naked, even after they had reached high-school age, leaving bruises that lasted for a month. They should have heard that Phillips's half-brother Eddie believed his step-father was having sexual relations with Phillips's younger sister and that the CSB had investigated a similar allegation. But the jury heard none of this because, as Phillips's counsel admitted regarding the evidence they presented at the penalty stage, we had absolutely nothing to work with, nothing. See Johnson, 544 F.3d at 604 (finding prejudice where, due to counsel's failure to investigate, the jury was misled into believing that the defendant's grandmother raised him properly and provided him with a stable life, when in fact both she and the defendant's mother provided the defendant with a violent, abusive childhood). In describing the Phillips home as an unpleasant living environment, the majority turns a blind eye to the abhorrent conditions that Phillips endured and their effect on his moral and emotional development. It is difficult to understand how the majority, in weighing the aggravating evidence against Phillips, can describe his crimes as particularly heinous, while dismissing the violence he and his siblings sufferedacts of the same order of odiousness as those he committedas merely unpleasant. It is also difficult to understand the majority's argument that the fact that much of the undisclosed mitigating evidence focuses on the abuse of Phillips's siblings, not Phillips himself, offers towering support for the conclusion that this evidence could not outweigh the aggravating evidence in the minds of the jury. Even were it to be shown that Phillips miraculously was spared the violence to which the other children in the household were repeatedly and brutally subjected, growing up in this environment and witnessing this abuse undoubtedly would have left its mark. But, in a household of rampant and indiscriminate violence, it beggars belief to suggest that Phillips was so spared. The testimony of Dr. Smith, armed with the evidence that Phillips's counsel failed to provide Dr. Brown at the penalty phase, offers a compelling argument as to why Phillips may not have shared this information. In his words, children who come from an abusive home, their first response is to deny that there's any abuse in the home. They are filled with guilt, shame, embarrassment. There's concerns about what other people will think. There is concern about reprisal within the family. Oftentimes, the child who breaks the code of silence will be rejected and shunned by other members of the family. (JA Vol. 10 at 5761-62.). Yet despite Phillips's lack of disclosure, it was Dr. Smith's unequivocal opinion that Phillips had been abused: The difficulties Mr. Phillips has experienced with his interpersonal relationships, especially his sexual relations, strongly suggest that he was the victim of sexual abuse. The research has identified several characteristics of victims of sexual abuse (e.g., feelings of guilt and shame, difficulty with impotence, confusion about the role of sex-enmeshed with sadistic and masochistic behavior). Mr. Phillips reported many of these behaviors. (JA Vol. 11 at 6590.) Incidentally, this conclusion is consistent with Phillips's otherwise jarring focus, when confessing his crimes to the police, not on being accused of murder or on the sentence he might receive, but rather on the fear of get[ting] pumped in the butt if sent to jail. State v. Phillips, 74 Ohio St.3d 72, 656 N.E.2d 643, 652 (1995). It appears incontestable that the jurors would have viewed Phillips differently had they heard a psychologist opine, based on traits that Phillips shared with many adult men who had been sexually abused as children, that Phillips had been sexually abused himself, and that his refusal to admit such abuse was unsurprising. Equipped with an accurate picture of Phillips's background, Dr. Smith also could have testified, as he did at the habeas phase, that Phillips suffered from at least borderline personality disorder, if not a more serious disorder, as the direct result of the trauma he experienced in his formative years. He could have offered the jury an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable fact that Phillips, with encouragement from Evans, had raped a three-year-old girl. Finally, he could have testified, based on clinical experience, to the likelihood of what might otherwise have seemed impossible to the jury: that Evans, like other women with a history of abuse and mental illness, had encouraged and participated in the abuse of her own child, and that her sway over Phillips was due to his own childhood abuse and resulting personality disorder. Instead of hearing this evidence, the jury heard from Dr. Brown that, while immature and prone to frustration, Phillips had no mental problems and was essentially normal. See Johnson, 544 F.3d at 605 (finding prejudice because mitigation expert gave damaging testimony that he would not have given had he been provided a more complete picture of [the defendant's] backgroundnamely, the [defendant's] remarkably traumatic childhood). The new evidence that Phillips could have introduced is the opposite of cumulative. Rather, it would have provided counsel, who was grasping at straws, with a viable mitigation strategy. See Rompilla, 545 U.S. at 393, 125 S.Ct. 2456 (finding prejudice where the evidence counsel failed to discover adds up to a mitigation case that bears no relation to the few naked pleas for mercy actually put before the jury); Morales v. Mitchell, 507 F.3d 916, 951 (6th Cir.2007) (noting that we have found prejudice when the jury was deprived of non-cumulative mitigating evidence such as severe physical, psychological, or sexual abuse, a violent upbringing, or abject poverty). The evidence withheld from the jury is similar to evidence that has led us to find prejudice in previous cases. In Jells, for example, counsel presented mitigation evidence focusing on the petitioner's quiet, non-violent nature and love of his family and called a psychologist who testified, like Dr. Brown did here, that the petitioner had borderline intelligence and difficulty controlling his hostility but no personality disorder or mental illness. 538 F.3d at 499. We found prejudice based upon evidence that Jells's counsel had failed to present that bears a striking similarity to that at issue here: Jells's mother was an alcoholic; Jells saw his mother's boyfriends beat her and was occasionally beaten by them himself; Jells had a history of violence in school and learning and socialization impairments; and, as psychologists provided with an accurate description of Jells's history concluded, Jells's abusive home environment had a profound impact on [his] psychological development. Id. at 499-500. Similarly, in Hamblin, we found that the petitioner was prejudiced when his counsel failed to present evidence of an unstable and deprived childhood characterized by extreme poverty, neglect, and family violence, as well as signs of a mental disability or disorder. 354 F.3d at 489-91. All of these elements are present here. Numerous other decisions support the conclusion that counsel's deficient performance in this case prejudiced Phillips. In Williams, we found prejudice where, due to counsel's inadequate investigation, the jury never learned that petitioner grew up in an environment[] in which there was an expectation that violence can and sometimes needs to be used, that people are constantly attempting to exploit others, and that illegal activities are often to be admired. 460 F.3d at 804-05. The other evidence that counsel failed to discover and present in that case would have shown that the petitioner's alcoholic mother frequently hit him, that his father left his mother when the petitioner was young, that his primary role model was an uncle who was a career criminal, that the petitioner was dependent on cocaine that induced paranoid fears at the time of the crime, and that he suffered from dyssocial reaction and mixed personality disorder. Id. This body of evidence is not materially different from the evidence in Phillips's case. Similarly, in Johnson, although some aspects of the abuse suffered by the petitioner were more severe than in this case, we found prejudice because the jury was not informed that abuse was a way of life during the petitioner's childhood. 544 F.3d at 604. We noted that a fully-informed psychologist would have opined to the jury that the abuse Johnson suffered caused his mental illness and that such a psychologist would have described to the jury the cycles of generational abusive and neglectful parenting that repeat the same behaviors and lead to the same outcomes. Id. at 605-06 (internal quotation marks omitted). In Harries, we found prejudice where counsel's deficient investigation failed to uncover evidence of Harries's traumatic childhood, including the significant physical abuse Harries suffered at the hands of his family, as well as the fact he spent much of his childhood in violent and unsanitary institutions; the fact that he suffered from a mental illness that may have been bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or antisocial personality disorder; and the fact that he had suffered frontal-lobe damage. 417 F.3d at 639. In Dickerson v. Bagley, we found prejudice where counsel's inadequate investigation failed to reveal that the petitioner functioned only slightly above the retarded level and was raised in a home where his biological father denied his relationship and where he was called the the moron and surrounded by pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. 453 F.3d 690, 698-99 (6th Cir.2006). In Carter v. Bell, we found prejudice because counsel failed to present evidence of a childhood in which abuse, neglect and hunger were normal, in addition to evidence that petitioner suffered from schizophrenia and psychosis. 218 F.3d 581, 600 (6th Cir.2000). In Coleman, we found prejudice where the jury never heard that petitioner was exposed to group sex and pedophilia, nor was told of petitioner's probable mixed personality disorder with antisocial, narcissistic, and obsessive features, nor of the likelihood he had organic brain problems and manic-depressive disorder. 268 F.3d at 449, 451; see also Glenn, 71 F.3d at 1207 ([T]he jury was given virtually no information on [defendant's] history, character, background and organic brain damageat least no information of a sort calculated to raise reasonable doubt as to whether this young man ought to be put to death.). In sum, this case is well within the range of this court's precedent finding prejudice resulting from ineffective assistance of counsel. Even under our modified-AEDPA review, I find that the state court unreasonably applied Strickland when it failed to find that Phillips was prejudiced by counsel's failure to present to the jury the violent and abusive childhood revealed by the CSB records and his half-siblings' affidavits, or the testimony of a fully-informed psychologist who could attest that Phillips was sexually abused and suffered from, at the very least, borderline personality disorder. The undiscovered evidence would have allowed the jury to better understand how a nineteen-year-old who had never lived outside the control of his abusive parents could have committed a crime of such shocking atrocity. Phillips's culpability undoubtedly would have been reduced in the jury's eyes if they had known that his only male role model had taught him by life-long example that it was appropriate to physically and sexually abuse the children in one's care. Viewed in relation to this evidence, Phillips's crime, atrocious as it was, becomes more comprehensible. Had this evidence been presented by competent counsel, there is a reasonable probability that at least one juror would have voted not to put Phillips to death.