Court Opinion

ID: 9690916
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 19:51:59.325977+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:06.653189
License: Public Domain

R OBERT L. BROWN, Justice, concurring. I disagree with the majority’s conclusion that the three defense counsel in this case made a strategic decision not to present mitigating evidence of Williams’s family and penal history. Each attorney testified that he was unaware that this evidence could be offered through a witness other than the appellant and/or that reason, failed to present the proof to the jury. It may have been a strategic decision not to call Williams to discuss his past, but it was clearly ineffective representation not to have presented this evidence through another witness such as a psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker. Defense counsel William Owen James made this point abundantly clear at the Rule 37.5 hearing: With regard to what I’ve learned since this case, I’d like to preface this, I was a pup in this game. I didn’t know anything about it. I’d watched some capital murder cases, hear bits and pieces, but I had never tried one. And so I hate to criticize, but, I mean, we completely and absolutely dropped the ball. We didn’t do anything we should have done for sentencing phase. I think there was huge amount of mitigation that could have been brought forward. I believe that this man’s life from the time he was born, I mean he went to prison when he was 14 or 15. He went to training school. He got out and robbed someplace with a broken shotgun because he thought he could [go] back to the training school, was charged as an adult and went to prison and then got out seven months before this happened, I believe. And I think the, I mean, the evidence would have showed that his family life was pretty messed up, that he didn’t have lot of guidance. I absolutely disagree that it was trial strategy on the part of the defense team, after careful consideration that the witnesses put on in the sentencing phase was the best way to proceed in this particular case. Before this I had tried no capital cases. From November to the time of the trial I was there every time and I don’t know — it frankly didn’t come up that much. The idea of mitigation was apparently by all of us. Like I said, I certainly don’t mean to discredit the folks who were helping me learn, but, this is the bottom line, we had no idea what mitigating — we thought mitigation was Boy Scout merits he should have got. We had no idea what we should have been looking for. James concluded that without question this social and penal history should have been conveyed to the jury through a psychiatrist or psychologist. Lead defense counsel Herb Wright, Jr., testified similarly: The concept of using a psychiatrist or psychologist or some type of mitigation specialist to come and present a life history of the client was foreign. That is something I learned in other experiences. I think to do that makes an incredible difference. In looking back, the problem as I see wasn’t that we didn’t have mitigation, is that we were ignorant of how to present it without exposing him. I was concerned about putting him on in the penalty phase. Now I know that I can achieve the goal through a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a mitigation specialist. Wright acknowledged that it was error on his part not to have presented a psychiatrist or psychologist to explain to the jury Williams’s background and history. He was simply ignorant as to how to go about it. He acknowledged that the defense team did not want to call Williams to testify, but the team did not know that they could have hired and called a professional to present this mitigating evidence. The third defense counsel, Phillip Hendry, testified that looking back on it, he would have put on Williams’s background in mitigation. The importance of mitigation evidence in the sentencing phase of a death case has been emphasized by this court. We no longer engage in a proportionality review of comparable crimes and sentences as part of our death-case analysis, because we have concluded that the weighing of aggravating and mitigating circumstances by the jury affords sufficient protection against arbitrary verdicts. See Williams v. State, 321 Ark. 344, 902 S.W.2d 767 (1995). That, of course, highlights the importance of mitigating evidence. Nevertheless, I agree with the majority that Williams has not shown that with the omitted social history and background, there is a reasonable probability that the results of his trial would have been different. What he offers in the way of early incarcerations, a dysfunctional family, and rape while in prison does not compare to the omitted history in either Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362 (2000), or Sanford v. State, 342 Ark. 22, 25 S.W.3d 414 (2000). For that reason, I agree to affirm.