By Matthew Vadum | Epoch Times
The Supreme Court has agreed to review the death sentence imposed on an Arizona inmate who claims he received ineffective assistance from counsel during the sentencing process.
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant the right to effective assistance of counsel.
In the case, the state of Arizona is appealing a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that the death row inmate was entitled to a new sentencing hearing.
The inmate argues that his lawyer failed to secure a mental health expert and conduct appropriate medical tests in a timely manner during sentencing.
The case comes after the Supreme Court cracked down on ineffective-assistance-from-counsel claims in May 2022.
In Shinn v. Ramirez, the court held 6-3 that federal courts reviewing inmate cases may not conduct evidentiary hearings to fully examine ineffective-counsel claims that should have been raised in state court proceedings.
The court granted the petition for certiorari, or review, in Thornell v. Jones, in an unsigned order on Dec. 13. No justices dissented. The court did not explain its decision. At least four of the nine justices must vote for the petition for it to advance to the oral argument stage.
Petitioner Ryan Thornell is the director of the Arizona Department of Corrections.
The case of the respondent, Danny Lee Jones, now 59, goes back to March 1992 when he was visiting his friend, Robert Weaver.
According to court documents, Mr. Jones and Mr. Weaver had been using methamphetamines and drinking in Mr. Weaver’s garage in Bullhead City, Arizona, when an argument ensued.
Mr. Jones attacked Mr. Weaver from behind, hitting him in the head with a bat. He also attacked his victim’s grandmother but she survived. Mr. Weaver’s seven-year-old daughter, Tisha, hid in a bedroom but Mr. Jones found her and struck her twice in the head and either strangled her or suffocated her with a pillow. After the child died, Mr. Jones stole Mr. Weaver’s gun collection, grabbed the keys to the grandmother’s car, went to the garage, found Mr. Weaver, and hit him fatally five more times on the head. After putting the firearms in the car, Mr. Jones fled.
The public defender assigned to Mr. Jones’s case had been an attorney for three years but had never been lead attorney in a capital case. Mr. Jones was convicted of killing Mr. Weaver and his daughter, and for the attempted murder of the grandmother.
After the convictions, the public defender visited Mr. Jones’s mother and second step-father in the search for potentially mitigating evidence for the sentencing hearing.
At the sentencing hearing, the attorney presented testimony from an investigator and the step-father. The investigator testified about an accomplice allegedly involved in the crimes. The step-father testified that Mr. Jones’s mother gave birth to Mr. Jones when he was 15 years old and had complications during the pregnancy and delivery.
He also said Mr. Jones had experienced several head injuries when he was growing up and that his personality began to change drastically when he was 13 or 14 years old. Mr. Jones began lying, skipping classes at school, drinking, and using drugs. His first step-father had introduced him to marijuana when he was around 10 years old and by the time he was 17, he was an alcoholic.
But in December 1993, Mr. Jones was sentenced to death.
The 9th Circuit previously ordered that Mr. Jones be given a new sentencing hearing but the Supreme Court overturned that decision in 2011.
A federal district court denied Mr. Jones’s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel during the sentencing process.
Then last year, a divided 9th Circuit applied the standards laid down by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and reversed that decision, without giving deference to the district court’s detailed factual findings.
The Supreme Court has agreed to take a look at the most recent appeals court decision.
The legal issue is whether the 9th Circuit violated the Supreme Court’s 1984 ruling in Strickland v. Washington, which held that to make out a claim for ineffective counsel, it must be shown that the defense attorney was objectively deficient and that there was a reasonable likelihood a different outcome would have followed if a competent attorney had represented the accused person.
Specifically, the Supreme Court will look at whether the circuit court erred when it disregarded the district court’s findings as to the evidence presented during the sentencing hearing.
Arizona argued in its petition (pdf) that “courts of appeal may not set aside a district court’s factual findings unless those findings are clearly erroneous,” as the Supreme Court articulated in Knowles v. Mirzayance (2009).
Moreover, the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that when reviewing prejudice under Strickland in capital sentencings, courts must “reweigh the evidence in aggravation against the totality of available mitigating evidence” to figure out whether there is a reasonable likelihood of a different outcome.
But despite this, the circuit court “erroneously” granted Mr. Jones relief for the second time in 14 years, the state said.
Mr. Jones’s lawyer argued in a brief (pdf) that relevant evidence could have been presented by his counsel during the sentencing phase but wasn’t.
His attorney knew that Mr. Jones was deprived of oxygen during the birth process and had a lithium deficiency, which is associated with serious psychiatric disorders. He was also treated with therapy and medication for mood disorders six years before the murders.
The lawyer had medical records a year before the trial showing that Mr. Jones had attempted suicide five years before the murders and had been admitted to a mental health facility, the brief said.
“Despite the red flags indicating mental-health, neurological, and/or neuropsychological issues, and despite the prevailing standards calling for sentence-mitigation investigations to begin ‘immediately upon counsel’s entry into the case’ and to be ‘pursued expeditiously,’ counsel did nothing to investigate Jones’s mental health until counsel requested an independent mental health evaluation[.]”
The Epoch Times reached out to attorney Laura Patrice Chiasson of the Arizona Attorney General’s office and Mr. Jones’s attorney, Jean-Claude André of Bryan, Cave, Leighton, Paisner in Santa Monica, California, but had received no comments as of press time.
An oral argument has not yet been scheduled in the case.