Bad defense often slides in death cases

Probe of clients' pasts poor, review finds

Jaw clenched, arms splayed, strapped to a gurney, Dexter Lee Vinson lay ready to take a lethal injection in a Virginia prison, his punishment for killing and sexually mutilating his ex-girlfriend, Angela Felton.

But even when the needle entered a vein to deliver drugs that would take seven minutes to stop his heart, it wasn't clear whether Vinson's vile crime was the only reason he had come to this end.

Was he guilty? Beyond doubt. But his path to the death chamber was cleared by 11 judges who watered down several U.S. Supreme Court rulings that require lawyers to defend their clients' lives vigorously.

Vinson's attorneys had never looked into the iron-pipe beatings their client took from his mother, or how his drunken grandfather liked to wake him with a flurry of fists, or how his debilitating childhood seizures probably signaled that he had brain damage.

State and federal appeals courts, charged with reviewing Vinson's case for errors, never flagged or fixed those omissions. So Vinson died without a jury ever knowing how his violent, dysfunctional upbringing had helped shape the man who had killed Felton so brutally.

His case isn't unusual.

A McClatchy Newspapers review of 80 recent death penalty cases in Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi found that the safeguards that were missing in Vinson's case are failing regularly:

* Of the 73 cases in which defense attorneys never investigated their clients' backgrounds, only two death sentences have been overturned.

* Eleven of the 73 inmates have been executed after exhausting their appeals. No court ever noted their attorneys' failures or ordered a remedy.

* The remaining 60 cases are on appeal, and the outlook for them isn't promising in three of the states. In Mississippi, no death sentence has been reversed for poor lawyer performance since 1993, according to state records. Only three death sentences each in Virginia and Alabama have been overturned for bad lawyering during the past decade. In Georgia, 11 death sentences have been overturned for poor lawyer performance in the past decade, but courts in the state still sometimes overlook the worst efforts.

* The U.S. Supreme Court, although inundated with requests to intervene in cases in which lower courts ignored lawyers' failures, hasn't moved to enforce its directives.

Courts are supposed to determine two things about lawyer performance when reviewing death penalty cases: whether the work was deficient and whether a better performance might reasonably have resulted in a different outcome. There should be a particular emphasis, the Supreme Court has said, on reviewing what kinds of background investigations the attorneys conducted into their clients' lives.

But the McClatchy review found that courts in these four states rarely hold attorneys to exacting standards. They excuse glaring oversights or omissions, explaining them as "strategic" decisions that aren't negligent. They have given credit to lawyers for describing their clients as "good guys" while failing to note the clients' history of mental retardation.

In the rare instance when they have found an attorney's performance lacking, the courts have concluded that a better lawyer wouldn't have mattered.

"The courts here just don't apply any sort of rational standard," said Robert Lee, who heads the Virginia Capital Representation Resource Center and handled Vinson's appeals. "So the worst counsel is allowed."

Vinson's case is a vivid example.

His trial attorneys missed myriad issues of abuse and mental deficiency in his background; that was undisputed. A psychologist who had worked with his trial attorneys affirmed that he was asked to do very little and was surprised to learn of all the issues he might have discovered.