Court Opinion

ID: 9497420
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:51:17.293477+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:11.568304
License: Public Domain

MICHAEL, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the judgment:
I concur in the judgment to affirm the district court’s denial of Jeffrey C. Kan-dies’s petition for a writ of. habeas corpus. I write further to explain why I vote to deny relief on Kandies’s ineffective assistance of counsel claim. I agree with my two colleagues that it was not an unreasonable application of federal law for the state court to conclude that Kandies was not prejudiced by his counsel’s failure to inquire into his history of childhood sexual abuse. This failure to inquire, however, compels the conclusion that counsel’s performance was constitutionally deficient; I therefore disagree that the state court reasonably applied federal law in concluding otherwise.
I would hold that the state court unreasonably applied Sixth Amendment law because no member of Kandies’s defense team bothered to ask him whether he had suffered sexual abuse as .a child. Defense lawyers in a capital case have an “obligation to conduct a thorough investigation of the defendant’s background.” Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 396, 120 S.Ct. 1495, 146 L.Ed.2d 389 (2000) (citing 1 ABA Standards for Criminal Justice 4-4.1, commentary, p. 4-55 (2d ed.1980)) (emphasis added). A background investigation can be limited “only to the extent that treasonable professional judgments support the limitation [ ].’ ” Wiggins v. Smith, 539 U.S. 510, 533, 123 S.Ct. 2527, 156 L.Ed.2d 471 (2003) (quoting Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 691, 104 S.Ct. 2052, 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984)) (emphasis added). “In other words, counsel has a duty to make reasonable investigations or to make a reasonable decision that makes particular investigations unnecessary. In any ineffectiveness case, a particular decision not to investigate must be directly assessed for reasonableness in all the circumstances.” Strickland, 466 U.S. at 691, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Courts must measure “reasonableness under prevailing professional norms.” Id. at 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052. The American Bar Association’s standards describing the duties of counsel are “guides to determining what is reasonable.” Id. Here, the ABA’s Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Counsel in Death Penalty Cases offer specific guidance for client interviews in death penalty cases. “As soon as is appropriate, counsel should,” among other things, “[cjollect information relevant to the sentencing phase of trial including, but not limited to: ... family and social history (including physical, sexual or emotional abuse).” ABA Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Counsel in Death Penalty Cases 11.4.1(D)(2) (1989) (emphasis added). The state court and my colleagues overlook this crucial standard.
It was an unreasonable application of Strickland for the state court to conclude that the performance of Kandies’s counsel was not constitutionally deficient. Counsel in charge of the background investigation admitted that he “never investigated [childhood sexual abuse] as a possible mitigating factor.” J.A. 1374. Counsel’s utter failure to inquire into an area specifically mentioned in the ABA guidelines is a good indicator that his performance was constitutionally deficient. See Strickland, 466 U.S. at 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Additionally, the nature of the charges against Kandies should have prompted counsel to inquire whether he had been sexually abused as a child. See Wiggins, 539 U.S. at 525, 123 S.Ct. 2527 (holding the scope of investigation unreasonable in light of what available records revealed about the defendant’s *480childhood). Kandies was accused of raping and murdering Natalie Osborne, his son’s four-year-old half-sister, circumstances that the prosecution obviously would (and did) use to press for the death penalty at sentencing. Because statistical evidence shows that men who sexually abuse children were often victims of sexual abuse themselves, counsel should have been particularly vigilant in searching for evidence that Kandies had been sexually abused as a child.
The state court did not find — and there is no evidence to support such a finding— that Kandies’s counsel made a “reasonable professional judgment[ ]” when he failed to ask anyone whether Kandies had ever been sexually abused. See Strickland, 466 U.S. at 691, 104 S.Ct. 2052. The only explanation counsel provided for this failure was that during his open-ended investigatory interviews “the subject of child[hood] sexual abuse which Mr. Kandies may have suffered was never raised” by anyone. J.A. 1374. Thus, counsel, like my colleagues, ante at 470-71 and post at 489-90, and the state court, J.A. 1381-82, attempts to blame those being interviewed for not volunteering that Kandies had been sexually abused. However, the ABA guidelines and common sense dictate that it is counsel’s responsibility to inquire into specific areas that might prove useful in mitigation. Counsel cannot expect the accused or his family and friends to know what sorts of facts in the accused’s background might be relevant to sentencing. Moreover, it is unrealistic to assume that facts going to mitigation — facts that are often painful to discuss because they may involve abuse or emotional trauma — will be freely volunteered in open-ended interviews. While open-ended interviews and questions have their place, no lawyer could expect to uncover all potentially useful information unless he explores important mitigation terrain with specificity. The failure of Kandies’s counsel to conduct any sort of inquiry into possible childhood sexual abuse amounted to constitutionally deficient performance, and the state court’s conclusion to the contrary is objectively unreasonable.
My two colleagues conclude that Kan-dies’s counsel made a concerted effort to undertake a thorough investigation of Kan-dies’s background for any mitigating evidence and that Kandies thus cannot establish that his counsel’s performance was objectively unreasonable. Ante at 471; post at 490-91. In support of their separate conclusions, my colleagues note that Kandies’s counsel conducted numerous interviews with the defendant, his friends, members of his family, and mental health professionals. Ante at 471; post at 485. My colleagues further observe that Kan-dies’s counsel presented thirty-three mitigating factors to the jury and that the jury accepted twenty-one of those factors. Ante at 471; post at 492. Likewise, the state court reviewed the mitigating evidence presented by counsel and concluded that “considering all [the] circumstances ... trial counsel’s performance was not objectively unreasonable.” J.A. 1383.
My colleagues and the state court focus on the wrong issue. The question is not whether counsel made an overall concerted effort to investigate Kandies’s background. Rather, the question is whether “a particular decision not to investigate” is “reasonable[ ] in all the circumstances.” Strickland, 466 U.S. at 691, 104 S.Ct. 2052 (emphasis added). While counsel seems to have conducted a meaningful investigation into certain aspects of Kandies’s background, there is nothing to suggest that counsel’s decision to conduct no investigation into an entire area of potentially mitigating evidence was “reasonable [ ] in all the circumstances.” Id. Indeed, counsel *481admits in his affidavit that he “would have pursued ” Kandies’s history of sexual abuse as a possible mitigating factor if he had known about it. J.A. 1374 (emphasis added). Counsel did not know about it for one reason: his investigation of Kandies’s background was unreasonably limited. The fact that Kandies’s counsel hired a substance abuse expert and forensic psychologist to evaluate Kandies does not alter my conclusion that counsel’s performance was constitutionally deficient because neither expert asked Kandies if he had been sexually abused as a child. J.A. 1371, 1383. The Supreme Court reached the same conclusion in Wiggins, reasoning that “counsel’s decision to hire a psychologist” and that psychologist’s “clinical interviews with [the defendant], as well as meetings with [the defendant’s] family members,” “sheds no light on the extent of [counsel’s] investigation” because there was no indication that the psychologist investigated other areas (such as social history) of the defendant’s background. 539 U.S. at 532, 123 S.Ct. 2527.
My colleagues transform Strickland’s objective inquiry (with due deference to counsel’s justifications for his actions) into a rule that counsel’s investigation of mitigating factors can never be constitutionally deficient if he puts on some mitigation evidence and a court can come up with a theoretical justification to excuse a blunder. Because this approach contravenes Strickland, I would hold only that the state court’s conclusion that Kandies was not prejudiced by his counsel’s performance was not an unreasonable application of federal law.