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| High court tosses death sentence over poor defense |
| By Washington Post |
| Published: 06/21/2005 |
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The Supreme Court overturned on Monday the sentence of a death row inmate in Pennsylvania, ruling that his attorneys failed to investigate readily available evidence of child abuse and mental illness that might have persuaded the jury to sentence him to life imprisonment. The 5-4 decision showed that the court continues to actively supervise the performance of defense counsel in capital cases. The majority acknowledged that attorneys for Ronald Rompilla had made some effort to delve into their client's troubled past during his 1988 trial -- but faulted them for failing to dig even deeper. The court noted that prosecutors twice told the lawyers that they planned to tell the jury about Rompilla's prior rape conviction, yet not until after the second warning did the defense team give even a partial look at the file from that case. The file contained documentation of the beatings and neglect Rompilla suffered as a child, as well as possible schizophrenia. Instead, the lawyers relied only on statements by Rompilla himself, his family and three mental health professionals. "It flouts prudence to deny that a defense lawyer should try to look at a file he knows the prosecution will cull for aggravating evidence, let alone when the file is sitting in the trial courthouse, open for the asking," Justice David Souter wrote in the opinion for the court. No reasonable lawyer would have made such a decision, Souter wrote, and as a result Rompilla's constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel was violated. Pennsylvania must now either give him a new sentencing hearing or agree to sentence him to life in prison, Souter wrote. |
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