Wiggins, Kevin v. Smith (Warden), et al. (06/26/2003)

Questions presented: Does defense counsel in a capital case violate the requirements of Strickland v. Washington by failing to investigate available mitigation evidence that could well have convinced a jury to impose a life sentence, as the Supreme Court concluded in Williams v. Taylor and as most appeals court have concluded, or is a defense counsel's decision not to investigate such evidence virtually unchallengeable so long as counsel knows rudimentary facts about the defendant's background?

BY NANCY PERLA, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

On Sept. 17, 1988, Florence Lacs was found dead in the bathtub of her apartment in Baltimore, Maryland.

Lacs lay in a pool of cloudy water wearing the blue skirt, white blouse and pearls she had worn to a luncheon two days earlier with her friends. Kitchen cleaning chemicals and a can of Black Flag were found on the bathroom floor next to her.

Though there were no signs of forced entry, Lacs apartment was ransacked. The states medical examiners determined that Lacs had been drowned after trying to fight off her intruder. She had bruises on her hands and neck.

After an extensive investigation, police concluded the man responsible for the crime was Kevin Wiggins, a construction worker who had been working in front of her house on Sept. 15.

Wiggins was charged with the crime after it was discovered that he had picked his girlfriend up on the night of the 15th in Lacs car.

When he was picked up by the police, Wiggins said, "My girlfriend didnt have anything to do with this," and went along with them quietly. He also had a rubber glove in his pocket that police assumed he had used to kill Lacs.

Later, police determined that Wiggins had pawned Lacs diamond ring and used her credit cards with his girlfriend the day before Lacs was found dead. However, neither the rubber from the glove nor Wiggins DNA was ever found in Lacs apartment.

While Wiggins waited for his trial in jail, prosecutors claim he bragged to two inmates that he had beaten and drowned Lacs and made off with $15,000 of her money. The two inmates, John McElroy and Christopher Turner, both received sentencing deals from prosecutor for their testimony.

Wiggins chose to have his capital murder trial with a judge and no jury. After four days of trial, the judge found him guilty of first-degree murder and robbery.

Social services records show that Wiggins suffered from neglect and abuse by his natural mother, that he was sexually abused at the foster home he was sent to, that he had permanent burn-scars on his hands from his mothers abuse, that one of his first bosses had made sexual overtures to him and that he was borderline mentally retarded, with a very low IQ.

Deciding that Wiggins would be better off having a jury determine his sentence, Wiggins defense lawyer chose to show that the facts against Wiggins were not strong enough to give him the death sentence. He made a tactical choice to paint Wiggins as an innocent man, rather than calling attention to his difficult childhood and low IQ.

The lawyer was later quoted as saying, "Wiggins best hope of escaping the death penalty was for one or more of the jurors to entertain a reasonable doubt as to whether Wiggins was the actual killer."

The defense attorney believed that the details of Wiggins past would have been too sordid for a jury to bear.

Nonetheless, the jury sentenced Wiggins to die.

Wiggins appealed to the District Court of Maryland, arguing that he had received "ineffective assistance by his counsel." Wiggins argued, with a new defense lawyer, that his lawyer should have called his rough past to the jurys attention.

The court sided with Wiggins, writing in its published opinion, "He did not receive effective assistance of counsel because his counsel failed to develop a social history exposing Wiggins harsh childhood and sub-average mental capacity."

After the sentence was vacated, the state appealed to the Maryland State Supreme Court. This time, the court decided in the states favor, saying that the attorney made an informed and strategic decision about how to defend Wiggins.

Wiggins then sought habeas relief in the federal courts. In May 2002, a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously affirmed. "We think that the Maryland Court of Appeals decision in this regard was reasonable," wrote Judge H. Emory Widener.

"Indeed, whether a particular bit of evidence is mitigating is often in the eye of the beholder. Counsel is not ineffective for failing to introduce evidence that would have hurt as much as it helped."

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had seen cases like Wiggins before. In 1998, the appeals court decided in Williams v. Taylor, also a capital murder case, that though defense counsel did not bring mitigating evidence into the courtroom at sentencing, the defense attorneys were not "ineffective." Much like the Wiggins case, the attorneys had made a strategic legal decision that would not have affected the outcome of the trial.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the 4th Circuit, throwing out Williams' death sentence. The Court opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, concluded that Williams lawyers made a mistake when they failed to investigate and to present substantial mitigating evidence to the sentencing jury.

That opinion came 16 years after the Court set forth in Strickland v. Washington what it hoped would be clearly outlined standards to determine ineffective assistance of counsel.

In Strickland, the Court, in an opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, established a two-part test for ineffectiveness; whether counsel's performance was deficient and whether it in fact prejudiced the defense. The performance prong was to be deferential to counsel's choices, and informed strategic decisions were to be virtually unchallengeable. It was also to be the defendant's burden to prove that "but for counsels unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different."

On Nov. 18, 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case, limiting review to the question noted above.

On June 26, 2003, the final day the Court issued opinions for the 2002-03 term, the Court reversed Wiggins' sentence by a vote of 7-2, holding that the performance of Wiggins' attorneys at sentencing violated his 6th Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.