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email edition up

By Karl R. Keys, Esq.

This week’s email edition is now available: Leading off this edition is the Sixth Circuit’s grant of penalty phase relief in Maurice Mason v. Mitchel. The grant of relief here is unexceptional. Counsel’s investigation consisted of “no more than reviewing documents provided by the state, arranging for a psychiatric evaluation limited to predicting Mason?s future dangerousness, talking to Mason himself, and very briefly talking to a small subset of Mason?s family members.”  Counsel missed evidence “that Mason?s childhood was marked by violence and pervasive drug use” and their “investigative efforts to learn any further details about Mason?s background were woefully inadequate.” “Mason thus ‘has the kind of troubled history that [the Supreme Court] ha[s] declared relevant to assessing a defendant?s moral culpability,’ and we therefore hold that ?had the jury been confronted with this considerable mitigating evidence, there is a reasonable probability that it would have returned with a different sentence...continue to full post

Full post as published by Capital Defense Weekly on October 12, 2008 (boomark / email).