Court Opinion

ID: 9494534
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:39:38.936981+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:27.389514
License: Public Domain

HAWKINS, Circuit Judge, with whom SCHROEDER, Chief Judge, joins,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I join Judge Graber’s compelling dissent and write separately to state my agreement with the majority analysis as to error in the sentencing phase. Of course, the normal consequence of the position Judge Graber so eloquently urges would be to give Mr. Mayfield a new trial on all issues, including a new sentencing hearing if a conviction resulted on retrial. I agree ■with both positions because Donald Ames performed in the same inadequate fashion in the guilt and in the sentencing phases. Guilt and sentence were tried seriatim and the performance of Ames, deeply influenced by the conflict of his ill-disguised racism, was consistently inadequate. Ames’s lack of preparation and bumbling presentation helped seal Mayfield’s guilt, his woeful approach to sentencing ensured Mayfield the gallows.
It is a painful truth of the death penalty process that these most serious cases sometimes draw the least adequate trial counsel.1 I join Judge Graber in concluding that the deeply conflicted counsel Mayfield had at trial was the functional equivalent of no counsel at all, and I also embrace the analysis which shows that the representation at sentencing was no better.

. Both Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg have recently expressed this concern in public comments. Justice O'Connor said, "Perhaps its time to look at minimum standards for appointed counsel in death cases and adequate compensation for appointed counsel when they are used.” Justice O’Connor Doubts Fairness of Death Penalty, L.A. Times, July 3, 2001. Justice Ginsburg went even further, "I have yet to see a death case, among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on the eve of execution petitions, in which the defendant was well represented at trial.” O'Connor Expresses Doubts About Death Penalty: U.S. Justice Points to Exoneration of 90 Death-Row Inmates, Dallas Morning News, July 4, 2001. See also Stephen B. Bright, Will the Death Penalty Remain Alive in the Twenty-First Century?: International Norms, Discrimination, Arbitrariness, and the Risk of Executing the Innocent, 2001 Wis. L.Rev. 1, 17-22 (discussing inadequacy of counsel in capital cases).