Court Opinion

ID: 9576719
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:27:32.709521+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:13:26.238815
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Chief Judge,
concurring:
I join Judge Tallman’s opinion in full, but I do have one misgiving: I’m not sure whether Rompilla v. Beard, 545 U.S. 374, 393, 125 S.Ct. 2456, 162 L.Ed.2d 360 (2005), still allows us to “reweigh the evidence in aggravation against the totality of available mitigating evidence,” Wiggins v. Smith, 539 U.S. 510, 534, 123 S.Ct. 2527, 156 L.Ed.2d 471 (2003), when counsel fails to uncover mitigating evidence. After all, counsel failed to uncover mitigating evidence in Rompilla, and the Supreme Court didn’t seem to address the aggravating evidence in assessing prejudice. See Rompilla, 545 U.S. at 393, 125 S.Ct. 2456. Still, I have a hard time believing that Rompilla overruled a recent case like Wiggins without bothering to say so. See id. (quoting Wiggins, 539 U.S. at 538, 123 S.Ct. 2527).
Rompilla devotes most of its analysis to describing counsel’s deficiencies, not to as*774sessing the prejudice to petitioner. The Court found that counsel were ineffective in Rompilla because they failed to adequately prepare for a penalty phase hearing where the prosecution focused on petitioner’s prior conviction, not because they failed to look for evidence of childhood abuse. See Rompilla, 545 U.S. at 394-96, 125 S.Ct. 2456 (O’Connor, J., concurring). As Justice O’Connor’s linchpin concurrence made clear, counsel’s “trial-preparation” there was deficient because they failed to obtain petitioner’s prior conviction file in anticipation of a hearing where the prosecution would focus on that conviction. Id. at 395, 125 S.Ct. 2456. Had defense counsel properly prepared for the hearing by obtaining that file, they would have stumbled across a cache of valuable evidence of childhood abuse and mental defect. Id. at 390-91, 125 S.Ct. 2456 (majority opinion). I read Rompilla for the unremarkable proposition that counsel must take the steps a reasonable lawyer would take in preparing for a hearing, not that counsel are always ineffective for failing to uncover childhood mitigating evidence.
I would therefore find (as an alternative ground for reversal) that petitioner’s counsel weren’t deficient, because they made a rational decision to pursue what was essentially a “pity” mitigation case, rather than try to make out a case of mental defect. Counsel faced a difficult situation: During the guilt phase, petitioner portrayed himself as a career criminal and boasted that he had committed hundreds of robberies using a gun. And petitioner admitted to breaking into Kumar’s house on the night of the murders. The jury had ample opportunity to evaluate petitioner’s demeanor. Counsel may well have felt that petitioner’s articulate and coherent testimony portrayed him as a clever liar, not as someone who is mentally deficient. This conclusion would have been bolstered by Dr. Stalberg, who evaluated petitioner’s mental state and found him essentially normal. While Dr. Stalberg has since flipped a couple of times in his conclusions, petitioner doesn’t rely on him now, so we can’t say that Dr. Stalberg would ultimately have come up with a helpful diagnosis, had petitioner’s lawyers only given him more facts. Petitioner’s new lawyers did eventually manage to find psychiatrists willing to say he is mentally impaired, but trial counsel had no reason to believe that they could swiftly find another doctor who would disagree with their own expert’s diagnosis.
Under these circumstances, it was reasonable for them to eschew a mental defect defense and pursue another mitigation strategy. Ultimately, they focused on petitioner’s mother, who testified about his head injuries, his disruptive behavior in school, a psychologist’s recommendation that she commit him to a mental hospital, his frequent stays at juvenile hall and his epilepsy. The dissent chastises trial counsel for making “no investigation into Pin-holster’s background at all,” dissent at 779, but I don’t see why talking to a defendant’s mother doesn’t count as an investigation into his background. The investigation may not have been as thorough as our dissenting colleague would have preferred, but surely it’s wrong to say that defense counsel conducted no investigation at all.
Petitioner’s mother was not the perfect mitigation witness, but it’s not clear that petitioner had a perfect mitigation witness. Nor is perfection the standard; the question is whether, applying the broad deference due to counsel under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 690-91, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984), and the even broader deference due to the California Supreme Court under AEDPA, 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), we can say that counsel’s *775decision is wholly unreasonable. This was not a case like Rompilla or Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 395, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000), where review of a single file would have yielded a treasure trove of mitigating evidence; finding all the evidence that petitioner’s current lawyers have amassed after years of effort and experNshopping was simply beyond the time and resources available to counsel at the time of trial.
Justice O’Connor’s concurrence in Rom-pilla reaffirmed the “longstanding case-by-case approach to determining whether an attorney’s performance was unconstitutionally deficient.” Rompilla, 545 U.S. at 394, 125 S.Ct. 2456 (O’Connor, J., concurring). Rompilla involved a particular hearing regarding petitioner’s prior conviction, and because counsel failed to adequately prepare for that hearing by obtaining petitioner’s prior conviction file, counsel were unable to adequately rebut the prior conviction evidence. See id. at 394-96, 125 S.Ct. 2456. This was a discrete, precisely identifiable strategy — “a sure bet,” id. at 389, 125 S.Ct. 2456 (majority opinion) — that no competent counsel could overlook or bypass. It is quite different from counsel’s debatable judgment call here as to how best to present their mitigation case — after petitioner portrayed himself as a career criminal at the guilt phase and their mental expert found no basis for mitigation. Under a “case-by-case approach,” id. at 394, 125 S.Ct. 2456 (O’Connor, J., concurring), I can’t say that counsel’s decision to focus solely on petitioner’s mother was unreasonable in these difficult circumstances. Nor was the state court unreasonable in finding that petitioner’s constitutional rights were not violated.